Jeremiah “Jasper” Thompson

A little background on myself. My name is Eric Davis, Jasper is my 3rd Great Grandfather, who I honor as my profile. I started my historical journey with no bias on a quest to find out the truth concerning the war. My interest was peaked as I worked on my genealogy. I was a screw up in high school and I couldn’t have cared less about history, or any subject for that matter. The history bug hit me later in life. I chose a blue collar career and I served my community for 28 years. For the last 15 years or so, I have studied the antebellum era and that alone. The reason most of you oppose the South is because you concentrate on slavery alone. You feel as though nothing else matters besides ending it at any cost. But the cost was heavy, especially when ending slavery was not for the wellbeing of slaves but as a means to destroy the political and economic enemy. Lincoln’s war affectively perverted the Constitution and changed the character of the government framed by our founders. This is why I support Confederate principles. It has nothing to do with slavery or race, as that isn’t what motivated Lincoln to invade the South. I support the Confederate cause because they supported the Constitution as ratified by the states.

Though not like it is today, Halloween was in fact celebrated during the War for Southern Independence. If you look hard enough, you can find references to Halloween in the media. For example, Harper’s Weekly published the political cartoon “Jefferson Davis Reaping the Harvest” in October 1861.

If you have been paying attention, you understand that basically everything we were taught in school concerning history was a lie — Pure propaganda. So, stand up for your Confederate roots!

Mark this statement for future reference. In the near future there will be a “terrorist” attack on American soil. We will be told it is Iran that is behind it. It will be another false flag incident to rally support to send troops to Iran. Fortress America is complete and it’s about time for a world war. It will be another step toward global consolidation.

Virginia was accepted into the Union with the condition that she could resume her sovereignty if the limitations of the Constitution were not observed. Act of the State of Virginia adopting the Federal Constitution,  passed the 26th day of June, 1788: “…That the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States, may be resumed by them, whenever the same shall be perverted to the injury or oppression…” New York and Rhode Island were also accepted with similar resumption clauses in the ratifications.

The slavery question was the logical and inevitable result of Consolidation. It is remarkable how many minds in America have proceeded on the supposition that this agitation was accidental, and have distracted themselves with the foolish inquiry why the Yankees assailed the domestic institutions of the South, while they neglected to attack the similar institutions of Cuba and Brazil. These minds do not appreciate the fact that the slavery agitation was a necessity of the Northern theory of government.

In regard to that familiar but most fallacious expression, “The extension of slavery.” To the reader unfamiliar with the subject, or viewing it only on the surface, it would perhaps never occur that, as used in the great controversies respecting the territories of the United States, it does not, never did, and never could, imply the addition of a single slave to the number already existing. The question was merely whether the slaveholder should be permitted to go, with his slaves, into territory (the common property of all) into which the non-slaveholding could go with his property of any sort. There was no proposal nor desire on the part of the southern states to reopen the slave trade, which they had been foremost in suppressing, or to add to the number of slaves. ~ Jefferson Davis in The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Vol. 1

Moral concern for slaves was not a priority for Republicans during Reconstruction. While nearly all the ex-slaves remained in the South where they yearned for land, the Federal Government gave them none. From 1865 to 1873, less than 10% of all Federal public works spending was in the former Confederate states, despite their greater need. In combination, New York and Massachusetts got more than twice as much as all the states in the former Confederacy. (David L. Cohn, The Life and Times of King Cotton, 148-49, 155-56; Hodding Carter, The Angry Scar, 321; Matthew Josephine, The Robber Barons, 93)

Many argue that tariffs weren’t a factor for war, but one of the most convincing clues that tariffs were a prime reason Northerners chose to fight a war rather than evacuate Fort Sumter and let the seven cotton states leave in peace is evident in America’s postbellum tariffs. Through their Republican Party proxy, the winners of the war increased the tariff on dutiable items from an average of 19% on the eve of the Civil War to an average of 45% for fifty years thereafter.

I hope the person who moved all the mobile buttons around on this app gets stuck in traffic after 2 bran muffins and a large cup of coffee.

Historian Charles Adams concludes that Northern merchants “now saw that there was only one course for them. They had prospered under the Union as one nation, and they now believed that prosperity would continue only if the United States was maintained as one nation. They had no choice but to support Lincoln and his policy of preserving the Union. Better to pay for armed conflict now than suffer prolonged economic disaster in a losing trade war. (Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events, 66, 70)

The Confederate Government never organized a Supreme Court because its founders generally interpreted the U. S. Constitution strictly. Although authorized to form one, they were never satisfied that they had developed a method that would prevent the Court from exceeding its authority.

In the 1803 Marbury v. Madison case, Chief Justice John Marshall established judicial review. Thomas Jefferson felt compelled to reply by explaining that Marshall’s ruling contradicted the “checks and balances” constitutional principle. He wrote, “The Constitution on this hypothesis a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.” Nonetheless, Marshall continued to issue decisions further narrowing states’ rights. His rulings in Fletcher v. Peck, Cohen v. Virginia and McCullogh v. Maryland, limited the powers of state legislatures. After 1815, most of the Court’s rulings favoring Federalism would benefit the central government.

Northeastern politicians called for secession when Thomas Jefferson was buying the Louisiana Territory. The seven senators who voted against ratification were from Delaware and New England. Although officially objecting that Jefferson lacked constitutional authority to buy the land, their true complaint was that the vast territory would inevitably result in the addition of more states, thereby reducing the influence of their own states in the Federal Government. Some argued for secession. Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering wrote Boston’s George Cabot in January 1803, “The principles of our Revolution point to the remedy - a seperation.” (Timothy Pickering to George Cabot, January 29, 1804, The Founders Constitution, Chapter 7, Document 24: University of Chicago Press; Thomas Fleming, A Disease in the Public Mind, 92)

Freebird. . .

The rule of General Benjamin Butler in New Orleans in 1862, is especially memorable for the deliberate murder of William B. Mumford, a citizen of the Confederate States, against whom the tyrant had invented the extraordinary charge that he had insulted the flag of the United States. The fact was, that before the city had surrendered, Mumford had taken down from the mint the enemy's flag. The ensign was wrongfully there; the city had not surrendered; and even in its worst aspects, the act of Mumford was simply one of war, not deserving death, still less the death of a felon. The horrible crime of murdering in cold blood an unresisting and non-combatant captive, was completed by Gen. Butler on the 7th of June. On that day, Mumford, the martyr, was publicly executed on the gallows. The Massachusetts coward and tyrant had no ear or heart for the pitiful pleadings to save the life of his captive, especially by his unhappy wife, who in her supplications for mercy was rudely repulsed, and at times answered with drunken jokes and taunts. The execution took place in the sight of thousands of panic-stricken citizens. None spoke but the martyr himself. His voice was loud and clear. Looking up at the stars and stripes which floated high over the scene before him, he remarked that he had fought under that flag twice, but it had become hateful to him, and he had torn it and trailed it in the dust. “I consider," said the brave young man, "that the manner of my death will be no disgrace to my wife and child; my country will honor them." ~ Excerpt from Pollard’s, Southern History of the War, 1866.

Secession was not a southern idea. Northern states threatened secession at least 5 times during America’s first 60 years: 1. The first time came in George Washington’s presidency when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton warned that the Northern states would secede unless the Federal Government agreed to assume an obligation to pay off their Revolutionary War debts.  2.In 1803, New Englanders threatened secession over the Louisiana Purchase. They worried that the new territories would ultimately become new states thereby reducing New England’s influence.  3. In 1807, New England again threatened secession after America announced a trade embargo, hoping to avoid the War of 1812, by use of economic sanctions. 4. When the British finally blockaded New England during the last seven months of the thirty-month war, the region held a convention in Hartford to discuss secession or other steps to protect their interests from Federal powers. 5. As late as 1844, leaders in the Northeastern states threatened to secede over the proposed annexation of Texas.

“The Confederate soldier went to war because he loved his people, because his country was invaded, because his heart was throbbing for his hearthstone. Here was the land which gave him birth; here was his childhood home; here were the graves of his dead; here was the church spire where he had learned it was not all of life to live nor all of death to die. No hostile foot should ever tread this consecrated ground except over his dead body…He could face the line of fire, but not the shame of standing back." ~ General Stephen Dill Lee on what motivated the Southerner to fight at a speech at the annual reunion of the UCV, in Louisville, 1905

“Three Months in the Southern States,” documented Colonel Fremantle’s travels through the Southern Confederacy, April - June 1863. He along with most of his fellow Englishmen, were inclined to favor the North due to the aversion to slavery. Gradually, he comes to the conclusion that the conflict is not over emancipation, but over differing economic systems, one commercial and industrial, the other largely agricultural. The North, seeking domination over all people and all things, the other content to live off the land. However, both are joined by a written constitution. The numerically superior North imposes protective tariffs on the imports of the South. The tariffs are a bounty to the North and a burden to the South. Those tariffs have the effect of levying an unequal and therefore unconstitutional tax on the consumer.

“He bowed the heavens also, and came down with thick darkness under His feet... He made darkness His hiding place, His canopy around Him, Darkness of waters,  thick clouds of the skies.” —Psalm 18