Written in Mississippi

The following is a poem from the 1820s by the great Southern poet and novelist William Gilmore Simms. It appears on pages 8 and 9 in Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms, edited by James Everett Kibler.

Oh! sweet among these spreading trees,
In noon-day’s fervor to recline,
Whilst arching in the cooling breeze,
We watch the distant wavering vine.
And at our feet the rippling stream,
In gentle murmurs glides along,
Free from the sun’s oppressive beam
We listen to the Mocker’s song.

And nought disturbs the gentle lay,
Save thro’ the pine-tops bending round,
The amorous wind pursues its way,
Scattering their leaves upon the ground;
Whilst far removed from noise or care,
Where man has scarcely ever come,
Borne swiftly on the drowsy ear,
We hark the noisy bee-tree’s hum.

Oh! thus remote from worldly strife,
Without the toil that crowds await,
How sweet to rove the vale of life,
Unchanged by love, unharm’d by hate.
Where no extreme of joy or ill
Can urge or clog the steps of youth;
Where all of life, the wild and still,
But bears the impress stamp of truth.

Swift as the red-deer could my feet,
Compass the wastes that now divivde
Thy form from mine, my more than sweet!
How soon I’d clasp thee to my side!
Here would we wing the fleeting hours -
Here taste each joy the heart can see -
Thou finding, at each step, but flow’rs,
And I, a fairer flow’r in thee!

GOP voter registration issues in Florida

What first appeared to be an isolated problem in one Florida county has now spread statewide, withelection officials in nine counties informing prosecutors or state election officials about questionable voter registration forms filled out on behalf of the Republican Party of Florida.

State Republican officials already have fired the vendor it had hired to register voters, and took the additional step of filing an election fraud complaint against the company, Strategic Allied Consulting, with state officials. That complaint was handed over Friday to state law-enforcement authorities.

A spokesman for Florida’s GOP said the matter was being treated seriously.

“We are doing what we can to find out how broad the scope is,” said Brian Burgess, the spokesman.

Florida is the battleground state where past election problems led to the chaotic recount that followed the 2000 presidential election.

The Florida Democratic Party called on the state to “revoke” the ability of state Republicans to continue to register voters while the investigation continues. Oct. 9 is the deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 6 presidential election.

“It is clear that the Republican Party of Florida does not have the institutional controls in place to be trusted as a third-party, voter registration organization,” said Scott Arceneaux, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party.

The Republican Party of Florida has paid Strategic Allied Consulting more than $1.3 million, and the Republican National Committee used the group for work in Nevada, North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia.

Southern expansion & Northern opposition (part 1)

August 13, 2012

By Michael

In a series of articles, we will examine efforts by Southerners in the nineteenth century to expand southward throughout theGolden Circle, resistance this evoked from Northern Republicans and how this sectional dispute over expansion contributed to the polarisation of the North and the South leading up to 1860-61 and secession. This series is based in large part on Purdue University history professor Robert E May’s book The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire: 1854-1861.

AN AGE OF UNITED STATES EXPANSIONISM

The nineteenth century was a period of United States expansion as the Federal Union spread from the Atlantic Coast all the way across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. US Expansionists also promoted gaining territory in the northwest, the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America. Had the expansionists gotten their way, the United States might have eventually extended all the way down to South America and throughout much of the Caribbean Sea. There was a great deal of support for such plans in the US as a whole, especially up through the 1840s. The pro-expansion Young America movement, while more popular amongst Democrats than Whigs, had many influential backers in the US Congress and public support in both the North and the South for its program of free trade and southward expansion.

SOUTHERN EXPANSION AND SECTIONAL DIVISION

However, as Northern opposition to the expansion of slavery began to intensify, radical abolitionism became more mainstream in areas of the Northern States and the sectional conflict between the North and South became increasingly bitter, the issue of Southern expansion becoming politically and regionally divisive. The agrarian South was in an increasingly worsening position in the US Congress and the Western territories were ill-suited for a plantation economy and thus promised to gradually strengthen the North’s political dominance over time as these territories were populated and eventually brought into the Union. Southerners saw expansion into the Caribbean and Mexico as a way to possibly balance out Northern gains in the West, bringing a bit more regional parity back to Congress. Professing support for bringing Cuba, for instance, into the Union as a slave State was nearly a requisite for Southern Democrats of the era to be elected to office. Even conservatives such as Jefferson Davis who were not overly enthusiastic about expansion into the Caribbean were forced by public pressure to at least lend nominal support to the plan. Meanwhile, in the North, opposition continued to harden against Southern expansion and the strengthening of the South’s political position.

FILIBUSTERING

Filibustering captured the imagination and support of many Southerners and their Northern Democratic allies in this period. Independent military operators organised movements, lobbied US congressmen and presidents and traveled through the South taking up donations and building up public support for their plans to conquer various regions or countries in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America. They operated sometimes in a grey area of the law, sometimes flouting Federal neutrality acts meant to discourage just such private adventures.

QUITMAN AND CUBA

Northern-born Democrat, Mississippi governor, Fire-Eater and filibuster proponent, John Quitman

John Quitman, a New York-born Democrat who moved to Mississippi (where he was elected governor) and became a leading Fire-Eater, supported and helped organise efforts for a filibuster expedition against Cuba, which Southerners had long desired to wrestle away from a fading Spanish Empire. Plans for a private invasion of Cuba coincided with serious political efforts at the highest level of the Federal Government in the mid-1850s to purchase Cuba or acquire it diplomatically. Ultimately, these efforts failed and the sectional fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Act (which effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise) took centre stage. Emotions stirred by the struggle over Kansas and Nebraska had a polarising effect and made the acquisition of Cuba politically impossible. Despite strong Southern Democratic support (with equally strong Northern Whig opposition) for gaining Cuba, Northern Democratic President Franklin Pierce (who wasaccused by his enemies of being a secret member of the Knights of the Golden Circle) did not have a unified Congress behind him on the matter. As well, Spanish opposition to selling Cuba proved stronger than initially believed by proponents of the plan.

WALKER AND NICARAGUA

The ‘grey-eyed man of destiny,’ filibuster William Walker

Tennessee-born William Walker was no doubt the most famous and successful filibuster. He led a group of volunteers which seized control of Nicaragua in 1856-57 and was the president of a short-lived republic before a coalition of Central American countries, seeing Walker and his fellow filibusters as a threat, united against him and ultimately executed him. Though he appears to have been a mostly non-ideological adventurer in the beginning of his operations in Latin America, Walker quickly adopted the political language and agenda of Southern Democrats as he appealed for outside support and more volunteers. He was regarded by many, especially in the South, as a hero. Walker was promoted by his supporters and hailed in pro-South newspapers as the ‘grey-eyed man of destiny.’ He, in turn, encouraged Southern planters to relocate to Nicaragua and to bring their slaves with them to work the fertile land. He met with leading Fire-Eaters and related his dream of bringing all of Central America into the Union as slave States. Congress, like the larger US public, was divided along sectional and partisan lines on the issue of what to do about Walker and his fledgling government. Some Southerners openly complained in Congress that Federal laws prevented the South from maintaining its rights in the Union by expanding (and thereby regaining parity with the North in Congress). After losing control of Nicaragua, Walker launched multiple attempts to re-take the country. He even converted to Catholicism in an effort to win over more native support. Ultimately, his efforts failed as he was captured by the British Royal Navy at their colony of British Honduras (now Belize), turned over to local officials and executed by firing squad – less than two months before Abraham Lincoln was elected US president and the Southern States moved to secede from the Union.

Moving the capital from Montgomery to Richmond

Montgomery, Alabama was the first capital of the Confederate States of America. When Virginia joined the Lower South States in the Confederacy the capital was moved to Richmond. What most people are probably unaware of is the politics that lay behind that move and how it was achieved over the strong protests of many Lower South leaders. One of those who opposed the move was Robert Barwell Rhett, the Father of Secession who had spent the previous three decades of his life promoting Southern nationalism. Rhett, a South Carolinian from the Lowcountry region, did all he could to defeat the measure. Ultimately he and his allies in the Confederate Congress were essentially out-maneuvered. There was more to Rhett’s opposition than loyalty to the Lower South. He felt moving the capital was a signal that conservative elements which were not truly Southern nationalist were regaining influence and would thrive in the less radical environment of Virginia. This was essentially a continuation of the old battle Rhett had waged for decades against the conservative elements that dominated Southern politics. Of course, those conservative elements, including President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander Stephens (both of whom had opposed Southern independence), dominated the government of the new Confederacy. Author and professor William C Davis describes the political fight over moving the capital on pages 472-473 of his book Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater:

As early as May 10 a motion came to the floor to move the Confederate capital to Richmond when they next convened. It had been part of the bargain worked when Virginia seceded, and it made every sense militarily and politically; and yet there were good-faith reasons to oppose the move as well. Rhett thought it would arouse more bellicosity in the North thanks to Richmond being threateningly close to Washington, which was sound enough. In the Confederacy he saw it drawing strength from the center of the nation [sic] to what was nearly its frontier, which was certainly true, but he overlooked the undeniable fact that if the Yankees invaded in the east, they would do it through Virginia, which contained much of the South’s vital industrial, financial, and transportation facilities. Virginia had to be protected, and it would be hard to manage that defense from a capital almost seven hundred miles away. Rhett opposed the motion by trying to postpone consideration but failed; he then unsuccessfully voted against the resolution itself.

President Jefferson Davis vetoed this bill, believing it to be unconstitutional.

Montgomery, Alabama – the first capital of the Confederate States – in 1861

The measure came up again on May 21, the final day of the session, and despite changes to win Davis’ approval, the bill seemed destined for defeat by 2 P.M. when they adjourned until later that afternoon. Since all that seemed to remain were some signing formalities on bills already passed, Rhett and a number of others boarded afternoon trains for home. When the congress reassembled, the removal resolution was reintroduced and quickly passed with most of its opposition gone, and Davis signed it that same day. Rhett was not yet home the next morning when he got word of the passage. It reeked of the sort of close dealing and corruption that had tainted Washington, and he suspected without real foundation that it had been planned thus all along in order to get past opponents like himself. Worse, he saw in the move to Richmond the shadow of the ever-dreaded reconstruction. Most of the Virginia delegates to the congress had been cooperationists in the old days, and now he even suspected his onetime associate Hunter of favoring reconstruction. The move to Richmond put the government on the soil and seemingly in the clutches of people Rhett firmly believed did not wish to see a permanently independent Confederacy. He saw the same design in the passive waiting policy of the administration too. They should be aggressively taking the war to the enemy, he thought. “Fighting exasperates, and exasperation is the probable defeat of reconstruction.”

The American Revolution & the Golden Circle By Michael

As we have discussed at length on SNN, the civilisations of the Caribbean and the Lower South were basically the same. The Lower South was geographically, socially, politically, economically and demographically the northern-most reaches of the Caribbean. South Carolina was settled (and ruled for the first several decades) by Barbadian colonists who brought their culture and values with them to the mainland. Settlers moved west from Carolina, spreading out across the Lower South. By the 1820s, only a few decades after seceding along with the New England and Mid-Atlantic British colonies and joining them in a common Union, some Southerners (especially in the Lower South) regretted ever leaving the British Empire. Their continual (and ultimately doomed) struggle with New England over the direction of the United States revealed the stark divide between the two great civilisations of the Union. In the end, of course, over half a million people lost their lives and the Southern economy and civilisation was almost completely destroyed when the two distinct civilisations met on the battlefield in a fight to the death in the 1860s.

Did all of this have to happen? Was struggle and war between the two ‘sections’ (as they were then known) of the United States inevitable? Increasingly, historians these days are going back a century or more before Lincoln’s war against the South to answer these questions. The US focus on ‘unity’ and the similarities of the seceded British colonies fades away the more one digs into the colonial world. What is revealed is the fact that half of the Caribbean civilisation seceded from the British Empire in 1770s and joined with the New England civilisation in an ill-advised Union that was to ultimately lead to their conquest and destruction. The other half of the Caribbean civilisation refused to secede, despite its many strong ties to the Lower South, and was thus saved the wrath of Lincoln’s armies in the 1860s. This revisionist look at our history, as it gains more ground, is sure to shape the way future generations of Southerners (and especially Southern nationalists) view the 1770s and early US history.

Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, writes about this issue in his 2000 book An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. A review of the professor’s book for the University of Pennsylvania Press sums up things nicely:

There were 26—not 13—British colonies in America in 1776. Of these, the six colonies in the Caribbean—Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, Grenada and Tobago, St. Vincent, and Dominica—were among the wealthiest. These island colonies were closely related to the mainland by social ties and tightly connected by trade. In a period when most British colonists in North America lived less than 200 miles inland and the major cities were all situated along the coast, the ocean often acted as a highway between islands and mainland rather than a barrier.

The plantation system of the islands was so similar to that of the southern mainland colonies that these regions had more in common with each other, some historians argue, than either had with New England. Political developments in all the colonies moved along parallel tracks, with elected assemblies in the Caribbean, like their mainland counterparts, seeking to increase their authority at the expense of colonial executives. Yet when revolution came, the majority of the white island colonists did not side with their compatriots on the mainland.

A major contribution to the history of the American Revolution, An Empire Divided traces a split in the politics of the mainland and island colonies after the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765-66, when the colonists on the islands chose not to emulate the resistance of the patriots on the mainland. Once war came, it was increasingly unpopular in the British Caribbean; nonetheless, the white colonists cooperated with the British in defense of their islands. O’Shaughnessy decisively refutes the widespread belief that there was broad backing among the Caribbean colonists for the American Revolution and deftly reconstructs the history of how the island colonies followed an increasingly divergent course from the former colonies to the north.

Confederates buried in Jefferson County, Ohio

By Michael

An SNN reader recently went to Jefferson County, Ohio, the site of a famous Confederate raid back in 1863. He visited a cemetery with some Confederate graves and wanted to share the pictures with our readers. It is certainly nice to see our people remembered and our flags and other symbols there honouring those who died fighting for Southern independence.

Justin writes:

Confederate General John Hunt Morgan came through Jefferson County in July 1863. He had a skirmish with some Yankees in the Northwest part of the county on July 26, 1863. Right below the cemetery is where these two men were killed and then brought up the hill to be buried. One man is named John Miller and the other was a mere boy as the pictures state. They were part of Company E 2 KY Cavalry.

Confederate remembrances held Saturday

Confederate remembrances held Saturday

by JB Clark/NEMS Daily Journal

Nicole Byrd places a wreath beside the headstone of 2nd Lt. William N. Cox as Cliff Richey stands by during a dedication ceremony at the Battle of Harrisburg National Park site in Tupelo on Saturday. (DESTE LEE | DAILY JOURNAL)

Rannie Gillentine sprays bleach on a row of headstones at the Okolona Confederate Cemetery on Saturday. (DESTE LEE | DAILY JOURNAL)

Saturday was a day of Civil War remembrance in Northeast Mississippi.

Volunteers with the Okolona Cemetery Restoration and Re-enactment Project began bleaching the 800 headstones of Confederate soldiers in the Okolona’s Confederate cemetery.

The group is preparing the cemetery for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Okolona, in February 2014. Martha Gordon, of the restoration committee, said when completed, there will be a flag flying for every state that has a soldier buried there.

The graveyard is home to many soldiers who were wounded or killed at the Battle of Shiloh and brought to the hospital in Okolona by train. Many of the soldiers’ identities are still unknown.

Also on Saturday, new headstones were placed on unmarked Confederate graves in Tupelo. The Sons of Confederate Veterans Harrisburg Camp No. 645 dedicated two headstones in the Battle of Harrisburg National Park to mark the 148th anniversary of the battle.

“I thank the men of Harrisburg Camp for placing these stones,” said Edwina Carpenter, director of Mississippi’s Final Stands Interpretive Center. “When a person gives all for his beliefs, he has recorded his name in the archives of heaven, it is right that we should remember.”

The two headstones are in memory of 1st Lt. John J. Stone, of Company H of the Coonewah Rifles 2nd Mississippi Infantry, and 2nd Lt. William N. Cox, of Company A of the 8th Mississippi Cavalry.

The two Confederate officers were buried in the Old Harrisburg Cemetery, on the grounds of the Battle of Harrisburg.

Stone was born in Alabama in 1811 and came to Mississippi around 1851. He enlisted in the Confederate Army at age 50 and retired the next year due to ailing health. Stone died in 1866.

Cox enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1963 and died in the Battle of Harrisburg in 1864 at age 28.

Kevin Thornton, communications officer for the Harrisburg Camp, said installing the headstones at the battlefield has been a project of theirs for 10 years.

A re-enactment of the battle at Old Town Creek, an encampment and a skirmish was slated for Saturday night on Mount Vernon Road, but it had to be canceled because of rain.

Read more: djournal.com - Confederate remembrances held Saturday