On the third day of rioting, orders came from the headquarters of the United States Army in Washington to postpone the draft. While that deflated the hysteria to some degree, enough rioters remained on the streets to require further action. New York mayor George Opdyke requested federal troops and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton moved four thousand men from the Gettysburg battlefield to the streets of New York.
The city’s death count from the riots was around one hundred. But that figure is likely low, reflecting the difficulty of tracking blacks who had been murdered, as well as the army’s unwillingness to give an accurate count of the rioters (and possibly onlookers) its soldiers had shot. Property damage was pegged at between $1 million and $5 million.
The New York Times, which even then was promulgating fake news, immediately published editorials claiming that sinister forces, possibly in league with the Confederacy, were behind the riots. There was absolutely no evidence of that, just supposition and hearsay. The truth was simpler. The Social Justice Warriors of the day had regarded blue-collar whites as dispensable and without rights. That oppressed class, which was willing to work, resented a process of social engineering built on their labor and sweat. As the original American Dreamers, they did not hate the upper class they hoped one day to join. But they did not appreciate privileges being bestowed upon the upper class after the fashion of the aristocrats in Europe. That was the world they had left.
Naturally, the cause the mob had embraced was quickly lost. The government needed soldiers. With armed soldiers in place now, less than a month later the New York draft was reinstated without incident. However, the real war was effectively won by tamping down the underlying racial trigger. Over the next two years, New York’s black population dropped by 20 percent from its 1860 level. The truly insidious result was the mentality of “us vs. them.” We were no longer a population of Americans but pockets of multicultural interests. Like a cancer, this has given rise to the social tumors of today among minorities: a growing sense of entitlement, a desire for separatism, and a willingness to participate in the hysteria of self-serving victimization.
HYSTERICS VERSUS HEROES
It is fair to say, and not just with hindsight, that the Confederacy was doomed from the start. In terms of population, the North had a massive advantage of 22 million to 9 million. And of those, 3.5 million people in the South were slaves, potential allies for the North. In terms of supply lines and troop transport, the North had twenty-two thousand miles of railroads, the South less than half that. The North enjoyed a manufacturing economy that was roughly nine times greater than anything the South had to offer. Add to that a whopping disparity in essential raw materials: the North had 94 percent more iron and 97 percent more coal.
The South also fought a primarily defensive war. As soon as Union General Ulysses S. Grant found vulnerable spots in the Confederate lines, he poured men and arms through, crushing the enemy from west to east. After a little more than two years of fighting, the Union army was just six miles from the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. For this reason alone, not a single plaque or statue of General Robert E. Lee should be touched. And I’m not alone in this belief. Recently, jazz great Wynton Marsalis took heat from his peers and from the left for his brilliantly astute comment that rap music has been “more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee”24 to the African American community.
With the sheer numbers and resources of the North piled against him, he still managed to deny Grant victory for a stunning two more years. Lee was not a political ideologue. He was an American patriot, the son of Revolutionary War hero and former Virginia governor “Light Horse” Harry Lee. The younger Lee was a top graduate from and former superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point. His heart ached at the very thought of a divided nation but he was unable to take up arms against his beloved Virginia.
FROM THE BIBLE BELT TO THE LIBEL BELT
It’s maddening that there is so little subtlety to thought, so little room for nuance, that a towering figure who was not perfect can be demonized by the left. Somehow those same critics can elevate to near-legendary status a president who sat on his hands through eight years of war, masterminded the lowest economic growth in our nation’s history, did nothing while record numbers of citizens went on food stamps, permitted homegrown terrorists to thrive while inviting millions more to these shores, created an unparalleled rise in health insurance costs, oversaw a new high for the national debt, did nothing to relieve the highest level of poverty in our history, supported the most devastating rioting since the Civil Rights era, said nothing as we saw an unprecedented hatred of police, ordered the shameful end of the American manned space program, allowed the rise of ISIS, and so much more.
If leftists could erect statues of Barack Obama to replace those of Robert E. Lee, they would do so. Maybe the big tobacco-growing states of Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina would go along with that if Obama smoking a cigarette were incorporated in the design. Maybe the statue of the Wall Street bull, which was drenched with blue paint in September 2017, to protest the U.S. pulling out of the climate change accord,25 would find a happier home relocated to beef country, where vegans could stick to their old, hackneyed protest of splashing it with red paint. If the deaf and insanely vengeful left could rename parks and squares after Michelle, Sasha, and Malia Obama, they would do so—just as in 2017, hate-filled, self-impressed, smugly dismissive “Americans” celebrated Malia’s birthday on July 4 instead of, not alongside, Independence Day. As Obama buys his expensive estate in Martha’s Vineyard, and takes scarce lakeside land for his pharaonic “library” on Chicago’s lakeshore, I wonder if our forty-fourth president, the former community organizer, would ever contemplate doing what General Lee did for this nation, accepting with quiet dignity the federal usurpation of his lands for transformation into Arlington National Cemetery.
THE (IMAGINED) ENEMY WITHIN
One of the stranger fits of mass hysteria in the United States ran parallel to the events discussed above. I say it’s stranger because it emerged suddenly in the 1830s, not from a long-festering resentment or a fear of a race that was different from WASPs. It was homegrown.
The early Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), were homegrown aliens and the country had no idea what to make of them. The faith was a hybrid of ideas that had no precedent. They were communal before communism was even a thought, preceding by almost twenty years Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto and more than a century Israeli kibbutzim and hippie communes. They were theocratic like the discredited Puritans, expansionist like Europeans, exclusionary like many religious sects, and eventually polyamorous. And most troubling to others, they were American citizens.
Actually, that wasn’t most troubling of all. That was problematic. I love the Bible, both books of it, and toward the end of the New Testament, in Revelation 22:18, there is a passage: “For I testify to every man that hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add to these things, God shall add to him the plagues that are written in this book.” Mormons not only added to the Bible, they held that the words of their prophet, Joseph Smith, superseded those that had come before. Understandably, other Christians took this as a provocation.
In 1830, shortly after the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and publication of The Book of Mormon, Smith was arrested in New York State and charged with “being a disorderly person.”26 He wasn’t; that was just what panicked and influential church leaders said since he represented a threat to their hegemony. When Smith was acquitted, he received instructions from God to relocate his church from western New York State to Ohio.
That was an ill-advised move. The Mormons’ growing numbers gave him increasing political power and caused panic that blossomed into hysteria. In 1832, the locals of Kirtland, Ohio, beat, then tarred and feathered Smith. Still, he didn’t leave that state until a bank he had established failed in the financial panic
of 1837. Smith relocated to a Mormon settlement in Missouri, where the faith was no more welcome than it had been in Ohio. Even before Smith’s arrival, Missouri vigilantes had opened fire on Mormon homes, set crops ablaze, and smashed a Mormon printing press after the newspaper published an antislavery article.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1838, LDS Church members fought intermittently with mobs. Members of a Missouri militia sent to quell the violence ended up joining the mobs, and a late October battle resulted in four Mormon deaths. Shortly after, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs authorized a 2,500-man force to deal with the Mormons. Think about that: A state governor sent an army after a bona fide religion of peace. Never mind the Constitution. Boggs issued an official statement that read in part, “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace[.]”27
A few days after Boggs’s decree, a two-hundred-man mob slaughtered seventeen Mormons in Haun’s Mill, Missouri, and Joseph Smith and some fifty LDS Church leaders were arrested. While most were released after a few weeks, Smith was indicted for treason. He escaped while being transferred and fled with the rest of the Mormon community to Illinois.
The Mormons purchased the Illinois city of Commerce and renamed it Nauvoo. It was here that Smith’s hubris became his undoing. He announced a new set of revelations, including that Mormons would engage in celestial marriage—or, as it was known in layman’s terms, polygamy. By 1842 he was openly declaring his plans to create a worldwide theocratic kingdom. At this point, any shred of welcome offered by Illinois was gone. When an unknown shooter wounded Missouri governor Boggs, rumors circulated it had been at Smith’s behest. For the next two years, Smith battled extradition efforts.
In 1844, Smith announced he would run for U.S. president. When a non-Mormon newspaper in Nauvoo ran articles criticizing Mormons’ polygamist practices, Smith ordered the newspaper shut and its press destroyed, much as a mob had done to his press seven years earlier. Unease turned into outright hostility, and newspapers urged non-Mormons to rise up against the community. Smith was arrested and charged with inciting a riot, but was never tried: on June 27, a mob stormed the prison and shot him to death. Illinois revoked Nauvoo’s city charter and the Mormons, under new leader Brigham Young, moved west. Eventually they reached the Salt Lake Valley, which at that point was part of Mexico. That changed after the Mexican-American War of 1846–48. The region was made a territory in 1850 with Young as its governor.
Young proved almost as incalcitrant as Smith. He refused to step aside as governor at the end of his term, and the ongoing practice of polygamy rankled many in Washington… and across the nation. The idea that Mormons were not only strange and dangerous but also un-American had had more than a quarter century to settle in the American consciousness. The result, once again, was an intemperate flash of hysteria. In 1857, U.S. president James Buchanan declared Utah to be in a state of rebellion and sent 2,500 federal troops to install a new governor.
Young prepared his followers for war. His tactic was simple. He wouldn’t attack armies but would disrupt supply lines. Unfortunately, a wagon train consisting of settlers crossed into the territory, and Mormon troops brutally murdered 120 people. While the Mormons initially tried to blame the Indians, they eventually admitted guilt. Young agreed to implicate one of the militia leaders and to recognize federal authority over Utah. In return, President Buchanan withdrew federal troops to outside Salt Lake City and pardoned all other leaders.
For the most part, this ended armed conflict between Mormons and federal troops. Questions about the church’s practices remained, however, and it wasn’t until 1890 that the Mormons formally renounced polygamy. That paved the way for Utah statehood in 1896.
Personally, I would have loved to see what today’s Social Justice Warriors would have done to help the Mormons. In fact, I wonder why none of them has taken up the question of polyamorous couples marrying. The “cause” is no more or less moral than any sociosexual relationship. The number of polyamorous people in America is between 1.2 and 2.4 million, so it should be on their radar.
And it would be, if SJWs relied on study, reading, and actual communication for the sake of understanding, instead of blindly following the will of people in power and people with money, and ranting hysterics on Twitter and Facebook telling them what to do.
WE MUST PROTECT THIS HOUSE
I have always said our nation’s future depends upon three qualities: borders, language, culture. Look at any nation or empire throughout history, from ancient Rome to the Ottoman Empire to colonial Great Britain. Once any of those have been compromised, the entity cannot be sustained. Appropriately, as Lincoln said, quoting Jesus Christ in that 1858 speech against slavery, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
The concepts of American unity have been lost to the progressive mainstream media and social media, and to the screeching vultures on the left—the sowers of mass hysteria like Obama, Bill De Blasio, the clinging Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, and financial bakers of social unrest such as the infamous George “the disrupter” Soros—who have stopped listening to any voices but their own and have willfully divided this house. Like ISIS blowing up historic sites in the Middle East in an effort to erase history that does not perfectly conform to or align with their myopic worldview, SJWs will not rest until they have destroyed America, taken its territory, and instituted laws that favor only their point of view.
I would trade a thousand such leaders for one Robert E. Lee.
Even after the Civil War, hysteria continued within these Disunited States. In the South, antiblack, anti-North rage among vanquished Confederates led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Other southerners found themselves joining mob movements in support of northern Democrats, who remained proslavery. Chaos reigned, and greedy politicians used their influence—and the military—to crush the culture of a proud, vanquished people. Today, for the first time in a century and a half, the oppressed conservatives are fighting back, fighting progressive hysteria with righteous indignation and action.
8.
FROM PEACE TO WAR
Hysteria Creates Seismic Shifts in America
Sic semper tyrannis. Latin for “Thus ever to tyrants.”
Some sources credit the phrase to Brutus as he plunged his knife into Julius Caesar. Certainly John Wilkes Booth thought so. Those were the infamous words the ham actor-turned-assassin shouted when he leaped from the president’s box to the stage of Ford’s Theatre. Before moving on to the mass hysteria spawned by the president’s policy of Reconstruction, this question of Lincoln’s tyranny is one that needs answering. And that answer is “yes.”
Lincoln assumed unconstitutional “war powers” to deal with the rebellious South. The first military draft in American history was one of those. Suspending rights regarding illegal imprisonment—the so-called writ of habeas corpus, literally that prosecutors “present the body” to a court of law for judgment—was another. Unsure of the loyalty of courts in the border states, Lincoln insisted on cases there being tried by military courts. Whatever the morality of the Emancipation Proclamation, as an attorney, Lincoln knew it was possibly unconstitutional. He issued it anyway.
The executive branch grew in size and power during the war, and there is no way of knowing whether Lincoln would have rolled that back with the cessation of hostilities. Certainly Reconstruction was going to be a difficult thing for the South to swallow, and it is likely the sixteenth president would have assumed even greater powers to deal with that. His main objective was to rebuild the union, not to punish the South. Abolitionists and Lincoln’s own left-leaning Republican Party might not have been pleased with a general amnesty. Repairing the ruined infrastructure would have been a top priority. That would have meant northerners traveling to the South… with both panic and resentment among the proud but defeated locals, and punitive measures from the victors. A massive military presence would have been required to preserve the peace. Enfran
chising the freed slaves would have been another challenge, especially concerning voting rights. As a first step, Lincoln may have had to contort the Constitution to accept the right of only literate males to cast ballots.
We cannot know how that would have played out. What we do know is that Reconstruction was a disaster. Under Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson—a Democrat and by most accounts a racist—old hatreds combined with mass hysteria to produce chaos… and impeachment.
Some of the national chaos was intentional and politically motivated. There was massive debt on both sides after the war. No one had expected it to last as long as it did, and there were no debt management policies in place. Though there was never any danger the United States would default, that notion was floated to persuade creditors to reduce the monies they were owed and to allow the government to hike taxes. Republicans and Democrats both played the fear card—for example, the Republicans spreading rumors that Democrats would forgive the debt, harming manufacturers, and Democrats arguing that specie (coin) made of negotiable, valuable metals was reliable and paper currency was not. These arguments ensured that people would pay attention to their platforms and vote. The hysteria died in 1870 when it became clear that the republic would survive, that debts were being honored, that war bonds reaching maturity were being paid, that the prices for crops were steady and rising… and the fake news subject was dropped by politicians and newspapers.
But the horrors in the South were real, the panic was not without cause, and the solution was radical.
DEMOCRATS: THE PARTY OF “COMPASSION”
Stop Mass Hysteria Page 14
