Most people believe there is only one Dixie: Erskine Caldwell’s tobacco road, a benighted misogynistic land where barely functioning cretins drawl an Appalachian twang so thick you can cut it with a knife. Actually many distinct and organic subcultures make up the region called the South. Broadly speaking, as columnist and Virginia native Florence King suggests, there were, and to some extent still are, two culturally disparate areas below the Mason Dixon Line: the Upper South and the Lower South.

Though Southern personalities range from the Melanie Hamiltons—well-bred high-born lovers of the arts— to rough old boys from the hills and the swamps, Southern culture from Kentucky to Alabama in general is marked by a love of freedom, a reverence for tradition and for the permanent things and not just an appreciation for but a need for courtesy. Novelist Margaret Mitchell believed that Southerners are by nature a violent people and developed courteous ways to control that tendency towards violence. Yankees, lacking all sense of the ironic, will not understand this apparent paradox because they are less inclined to make the finer distinctions that Southerners make from the time they cut teeth. Yankees are just not as perceptive as Southerners; they are handy at keeping everything spic and span and in good repair, but they are not subtle. Many a hapless Northerner has stared eternity in the face without the slightest hint of his imminent demise because of Southern manners...perfect manners that sometimes mask murderous passions in the Southern soul.

Because Southern people in more ways than one speak the same language, a person from Virginia will have much in common with someone from Georgia. That same Virginian will find a Vermonter strangely foreign and will have trouble conversing with him.

But a real Virginian will have more in common with a real Marylander that with a Georgian. The Upper South and the Lower South are different. Further distinctions could be made between the upland and the lowland, the inland and the Tidewater Southerner, but for now let’s consider the two main cultures of the South.

Florence King once wrote that the Upper South—Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky— is the South of bourbon, horses and tobacco while the Lower South is the South of moonshine, mules and cotton. The implication, rightly or wrongly, is that the Upper South is more genteel, more aristocratic. But no culture was more aristocratic than that of the ante-bellum Mississippi Delta, so this doesn’t ring entirely true even though it seems that Virginians down through the years have been considered a cut above everyone else in the South.

But it is certainly true that the two areas developed differently agronomically and politically. Concerning the latter, the states of the Upper South were more reluctant to secede from the Union than their sisters in the Lower South. Concerning agronomics, cotton has never grown in abundance in the Upper South as it has in the Lower. Planters in Maryland and Virginia in the years preceding the WBTS began selling slaves "down river, " a tragic fate for those born in bondage for so many reasons, because, though tobacco was labor-intensive, it did not require the acreage that growing cotton required. Fewer slaves were needed to grow tobacco. The fact that tobacco not cotton was widely grown in Maryland might account for the large number of freedmen living in the state before the War. Fifty percent of the African Americans living in Maryland just prior to the WBTS were free.

But though tobacco not cotton was king in Maryland, planters did grow some cotton, mainly for the personal use of plantation families. Cotton, as well as flax, was grown on plantations like Rose Hill in Cecil County. And in the early 1800s in Southern Maryland, cotton was raised to support the ship building industry in Baltimore. It was used to manufacture a material called duck from which sails for ships were made. Historians tell us that there were many cotton mills in early Maryland.

And cotton has been raised in the Old Line State in recent times too. A few years ago a friend of mine was driving around in Charles County not far from the Cobb Island area when he was brought up short by a field of white blossoms. Standing on the roof of his car, he saw acre after acre of cotton. It was a beautiful sight.

Since Maryland’s climate seems to be able to support cotton farming and since the scalawags and carpetbaggers in Annapolis have bribed our farmers to abandon the production of tobacco, a crop grown in Maryland for almost 400 years, perhaps our farmers could take up raising cotton. Or would that be too Southern? On second thought, maybe instead they should just plant potatoes and paint their barns bright red and wear bibbed overalls and eat lefse and noodles instead of hot biscuits. This would warm the hearts of those who wish to deracinate us, to turn us into a Northern state.

In Maryland’s Catholic schools, it is politically correct Maryland history that is taught by lay teachers most of whom are from Up North. One fourth grade text currently in use in the Washington D.C. Archdiocese passes off the Barbara Fritchie tale as history when it is in fact merely legend. The author of the book is either culpably ignorant or dishonest. Regardless, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that Fritchie, who was likely a Pennsylvanian, ever confronted General Jackson on the streets of Frederick. Actually, Stonewall’s aide, Henry Kyd Douglas, never left the general’s side the whole time the Confederates were in the city, and Kyd said he did not witness Fritchie’s defiance of Jackson nor her defense of the Yankee flag. Moreover, the Yankee poet who wrote the infamous poem about the old hag was no where near Frederick at the time.

St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest Catholic theologians who ever lived, would have had much to say about this brand of "truth." At the heart of his Thomistic philosophy was a belief in absolutes. How tragic it is then that the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church in America at least, is now a reservoir of secularism and relativism.

A Jesuit priest about five years ago, with whom I was discussing history and specifically historical research, told me that first person/primary source accounts of the past were all but useless because of human biases. The priest was in effect saying that modern "enlightened" people with feminist-humanist perspectives are more capable of "determining" what is acceptable as the truth about past events than the people who lived the events themselves. In other words, there is no truth but the one imposed by the ruling elite and the highly favored victim classes in a society. This is, of course, epistemologically at odds with what Thomists—the one or two of us who are still around—espouse.

Few philosophical traditions have contributed as much to the depth and the beauty of Western culture as have the tenets of Thomistic thought. Thomistic-based Aristotelian tradition is founded on the principle of the objectivity of truth (the truth doesn’t depend on how you feel, who you are, what you want). But in the present-day Church, which more and more mirrors the secular world, the truth no longer matters. The Church uses history, and other academic disciplines, to correct the sins of our founding fathers, to lift up the oppressed (many of whom are streaming across America’s Southern border so they can live in this supposedly racist country) while reducing the oppressors—white heterosexual males—to a subservient role in society.

As the Church appears to degenerate becoming seemingly the Church of Christ Without Christ and a tool for the left, it is important to remember that the institution is greater than the sum of its parts, and it will endure. And those of us educated by the old-school sisters, even with their eccentricities and sometimes outright cruelty, have the benefit of a modicum of wisdom to pass on to our grandchildren. Before we can be wise, we must know what is true. And we must pass that truth on.

At first I thought it was my imagination, but now I am convinced that lately I am seeing more Battle Flags in St. Mary’s County. An increasing number of Countians are displaying the old banner on the windows and bumpers of their cars and pickup trucks—mostly pickups. Many factors could account for the resurgence of Southern patriotism in St. Mary’s, but my theory is that since the flag and other Southern symbols appear mainly on the trucks of young male drivers, it is a matter of self-expression on the part of this displaced and disenfranchised segment of society. Discovering their Southern roots, they are defining themselves and rejecting the Yankee values of the larger American culture, a culture which considers them personae non gratae.

When I am driving along Route 235 in this now alien land, I am always happy to see one lane over on an old work truck, a defiant Cross of St. Andrew, hoping that it is a manifestation of true patriotism and an understanding of the war and the nation whose birth brought it about rather than just a "bad boy" affectation. But even if it is, it’s good to see the Southern colors on the road.

I wish I could see more flags flying on front lawns in St. Mary’s as well. But there are only a few. Down in the southern part of the county, there is at least one First National flying (not the Battle Flag but still a Southern emblem), and of course way down in the County the Battle Flag flies to commemorate the Southern dead at Point Lookout. Near Leonardtown. there is a Battle Flag,painted on the side of a building (last time I saw it, the paint was flaking off, but it was still of work of art to me). And also near Leonardtown, a First National graces the front of a small business. Finally, not long ago I was pleasantly surprised to see an old faded Battle Flag on a back road in Hollywood. Just a few flags are flown in St. Mary’s , but really just as many as are seen in the Northern Neck of Virginia. We are holding our own.

But we could do more to show our Southern pride and make Yankees mad at the same time. If anyone wishes to purchase a flag or patriotic bumper stickers, there are many places on the internet where they are available. One of my favorites is the Ruffin Flag Company in Georgia. They have a good selection including novelty items such as Confederate dog collars and leashes.

And at MakeStickers.com it is easy to design your own Southern bumper stickers. You don’t need to order them by the gross…you can buy any number even if it is just one. And there are many other sites too if this one doesn’t suit you.You can even scan in your own "rebel" graphics to use along with a pity saying or quotation. Might I suggest "Yankee Go Home," "Jeff Davis for President," or my personal favorite, "Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum! Maryland! My Maryland!" ( a line from our state song).

I would be disingenuous if I didn’t admit that it takes some courage to display Southern emblems, but at some point, we have to take a stand for what we believe even if that stand is a $4.00 bumper sticker.

William Nash of Westmoreland County, Virginia was a poor man, hardly an ancestor about which to brag it would seem. In the 1860 Census, his occupation was given as "laborer." He was my great great grandfather, a poverty- stricken, thirty- eight year old drummer boy, and I am very proud of him.

On June 20, 1862, William died of illness near Richmond. He left behind Bushrod, his other children, and his wife, Alice Melinda Mothershead Nash, who would eventually receive a pension from the state of Virginia. I don’t know where Alice is buried or William either. I believe they were Baptist, but they might have been Methodist. I have searched the burial records for Westmoreland and neighboring counties but have not had any luck in finding these long-dead kinsmen.

Bushrod Nash married Maria Dyer from St. Mary’s County after the war. At that time, unlike today, Westmoreland and St. Mary’s were sister counties united by cultural, familial and political ties. Bushrod’s granddaughter, my aunt, told me that "Grandpapa," as she called him, was ordinary…that there was not much to him. But, how sad it is that she, like so many of us, was unable to rise above bitterness towards errant or disappointing family members long enough to ask questions about past events that would shed light on so many mysteries. St. Mary’s County people have labored for so long to shake off the dust of what they have considered their humble backwoods upbringing, they have forgotten to ask questions of those who lived the most tragic and important event in American history. Had anyone bothered to ask Grandpapa about the war, we would now know if in fact he served, following in his dead father William’s footsteps. We would know perhaps what it was like waiting to no avail for William to come home and if his family went hungry during the war and the grim details of surviving in his absence. We would have learned about the final days, the desperation of the South and if boys as young as 15 in Westmoreland County were called on to defend the state from the Yankees. We might have learned where William and Melinda were laid to rest.

Indifference has left some of us piecing together a heritage for ourselves. When my mother was a child in the 1930s, there were still old Confederate Vets around in St. Mary’s County who could have shed light on our past, who could have told us more about who we were, who we are. But St. Mary’s Countians, denying our Southern roots and concerning ourselves with Yankee materialism, haven’t bothered asking about our past. Now we are bereft of it. We have trouble defining ourselves. Unwilling or unable to claim our Southern birthright, we are left then with nothing…we are the pale creatures Fugitive Poet and Southern Agrarian Andrew Lytle spoke of; we are T.S. Elliot’s hollow men...some of us are drunks…some of us spend our lives in pursuit of the meaningless trappings and one-upmanship of the secular world…these are the ways we quell the rage we feel at what we have lost, at our nothingness.

One or two of us stubbornly hang on…eccentrics reviled by almost everyone sticking up for a land that doesn’t even claim us. We are more pitiful than old Rebels in Texas or Georgia; we must fight for the right to mourn our cultural, historical loss; we must fight to establish that we are Southerners. We are told by the ignorant and presumptuous that we are not the children of those who defended the South and battled tyranny. But a handful of us will go to our graves raging against their lies and proud that we are the descendants of the Tidewater cavaliers and old drummer boys who gave their lives for freedom.

Recently, I overheard two comments concerning Maryland that bear discussing. The comments, one made by a Southerner, the other by a Yankee, clearly illustrate the existential fog in which most people seem to be enveloped lately.

The Southerner’s comment concerning our state is the more egregious by virtue of the fact that he should know the Southland better than his offhand remark indicates he does. A Southerner should know the South. What I overheard him say was something to the effect that as long as he was in Maryland for a few days, he should probably have himself some lobsters. This was a deliberate misstatement and an insult to True Marylanders. He was calling us Yankees. His "faux pas" will seem trivial to carpetbaggers and the deracinated, but to those of us who still take a stand for our heritage, it was a slap in the face.

The second comment that I found noteworthy was made by a young girl…probably about 16 …who by her accent was from up North. She was fussing about the cold snap we had a while back implying that she wasn’t used to it and wishing that she were in South Carolina (where it was a balmy 7 degrees warmer than here). I have in this column mentioned previously the problem of Yankees pretending to be Southerners when they are in Maryland to call attention to themselves.

But, as I have also pointed out in this column, Maryland was once considered a Southern state by Yankee and Southerner alike. There are many reasons the Old Line State has been redefined, but no one can argue— sincerely at least— that a redefining has not taken place. Consider the sarcastic lobster remark of two weeks ago; then consider the words of a Mississippian in the early 1900s.

And she continues:

The South once claimed Maryland as her own. Now we are as unloved in this region as a red-headed step child. But why bother documenting that Maryland was viewed much differently in the past than she is today? Maryland’s cultural cleansing matters very little or not at all to most. But to those of us who abjure the Yankee realm and Yankee lies, and more importantly, understand what motivates the lies and the consequences of those lies, defending a small Southern state’s heritage is perhaps the most important thing we can do.

Each year about this time, I brace myself for all the shouting over Abraham Lincoln, the melancholic dictator who had a way with words, a penchant for bawdy, scatological humor.. and bad feet. John Wilkes Booth assassinated Old Abe while the president was watching "My American Cousin" at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday evening in 1865. With a well-placed pistol shot, Booth ended the life of the homespun tyrant whose war had left the South in ruins and had sewn the seeds of Southern poverty and hopelessness for decades. Northerners, under the ruthless leadership of Lincoln and with vast resources at their disposal, reduced the South to bondage, to starvation and despair, then down through the years, mocked Southerners for being poor and despairing. Reconstruction, though carried out by the sixteenth president’s henchmen, even crueler tyrants than he, amounted to nothing more than a continuation of policies the author of which was Lincoln himself. Still, Booth, a Marylander, by killing him, changed the course of American and world history. Revisionists, however, like the lackluster liberal types who live in Montgomery County, a New England conclave in the middle of old Maryland, uncomfortable with real history, have largely ignored Booth and other Maryland Confederates and have replaced the story of Maryland’s fiery past with a pathetic, effeminate and poorly written tale signifying nothing.

When the Yankees running Maryland pay any attention to Booth at all, they call him a psychopath or view him as an aberration…a "Yankee" with Southern sympathies rather than the Southerner with Southern sympathies he truly was. Booth confounds the Yankees in charge of our state’s history because he is part of an embarrassingly Southern pantheon of Maryland history makers. Having trouble finding important Marylanders who worked on behalf of the North, they invent them. Yankee revisionists pretend that Clara Barton, who was not from Maryland, was more representative of Maryland than Booth. Yankees pretend that the Barbara Fritchie tale is true and promote this lie to tourists rather than acknowledge real Maryland historical personalities like Rebel Rose and Mary Surratt.

In their revisionist hysteria, Yankees occupy themselves with irrelevancies, favoring the age-old practice of name calling. They ridicule Booth’s acting ability as if that has anything to do with the significance or the immorality of shooting Lincoln. The truth is that Booth appeared in many plays over the course of his acting career; he was considered a good actor if not a brilliant one.

If the Yankees had an historical figure equal to Booth, that is all that we would hear about. But Booth could not have been a product of the North; he was uniquely Southern (Anglo-Celtic). His breeding, manners and attire were gentlemanly; his rage, a Southerner’s rage…when aroused, murderous.

Maryland’s history when it is told truthfully is spellbinding, while the Yankee rendition is bland, boring. Emily Bronte could not have written a more thrilling romance novel than the story of Maryland and the War Between the States. Why not preserve all aspects of Maryland’s history, the good as well as the bad, the noble as well as the ignoble? How are we to learn lessons from the past if we lie about it? Booth might have been an assassin, but he belonged to Maryland, and we as Marylanders have no choice but to claim this compelling historical figure who, on a spring night in Washington, made a saint and a legend out of an all too flawed and ordinary man.

Race Baiting for Fun and Profit

How quickly some people cry racism these days. Opportunists and extortionists looking for political or economic gain know that Americans are hypersensitive to the possibility that they might be accused of harboring hatred for others. I actually heard someone, addressing the race issue, say recently, "You know you have to be so careful what you say anymore." And one person upon learning that I am the author of this column admonished me a few weeks ago that I had "better watch it."

Jesse Jackson, extortionist of note, has amassed a fortune pitting black people against white people. Working his scam, he has even turned his attentions to the last remaining bastion of working class Southern conservative values, Nascar racing, and is charging that racism is the reason there are virtually no black drivers in the sport. Already consumed with insecurities over their public image and having diligently removed all Confederate symbols and language from their venues (they can’t do much about the fans yet), Nascar officials, on the run with their tails tucked between their legs, are kowtowing to Jackson’s demand for extortion money. What a bunch of sissy babies.

These girlie men know in their hearts that Jackson is reprehensible, but they are too cowardly to call his bluff. Even liberals know that what Jackson is doing amounts to blackmail, but they won’t condemn his con game because they judge black people by lower standards than those by which they judge whites. Liberals are the true racists because they are color conscious. As I wrote a few weeks ago, liberal prosecutors in New York recently let a black woman go free after she scalded her baby daughter in a bath tub. It took nine days for this child to die. Nothing has saddened me as much as this incident has, and I believe there must be justice for this little one. But apparently her murderer—her mother—will answer for this crime when she stands before her Maker. Because liberal prosecutors and judges don’t really care about little black children, some parents are at liberty to abuse and even kill with no consequences, no earthly consequences that is.

But the Jesse Jacksons, the Julian Bonds, the Al Sharptons are mute when it comes to real examples of racism. They demand no justice for that little girl. They say nothing about the slave trade and human suffering in Africa. They are too busy worrying about somebody raising a Battle Flag.

And they are not alone...even so-called conservatives are taken with the racism hysteria sweeping the land. Neo-conservatives like Sean Hannity, ignorant of American history and the American political system, proudly distance themselves from what they perceive as God-awful racist neo-Confederate elements. Hannity refuses even to have a dialogue with those who defend the cause of the South. He calls people names and closes his mind. Hannity sounds very much like a conservative until he holds forth on the War Between the States. He thinks Lincoln was a saint not the despot he really was; he believes the North was fighting to free the slaves; he demonizes anyone who promotes real Southern history.

Hannity thinks the Battle Flag is a racist symbol, and like any big government liberal, wishes to tell the people of South Carolina and other states which flags they may fly over state capitol buildings or anywhere else. He is oblivious to the irony that because the North won the war, the federal government against which he rails has grown dangerously powerful and censors free speech.

Bureaucrats from the belly of the beast in Washington to local boards and committees...those bodies that affect the daily lives of hard-working, over-burdened taxpayers in each community... determined to purge Confederate symbols from the American landscape because they are ideologues or just because they want to stay in their positions of power...are marginalizing whole segments of society. Once respectable people are now consigned to the lunatic fringe. The term "radical" is used almost with as much regularity as "racist."

But is it radical to fly an American flag? There is a movement in this country to ban the flying of even this banner. When the sissies who always back down when the going gets rough are told to lower that flag, to remove it from their front lawns because it represents hate speech and American xenophobia and hegemony, will they meekly lower the flag so they won’t be called names? Will they acquiesce when someone on a board calls the flag a violation of local zoning codes? What will they do then? Will they examine their consciences and find that they should have defended those damnable Southern troublemakers after all?

I am one of those Southern troublemakers. I believe that the South was right, that slavery was wrong, that the WBTS was not about slavery. I am not a racist. I hate no one. But no one will tell me which flag to fly. And no one will keep me from celebrating my Southern heritage. I believe that many people reading this column value the rights with which they were endowed by their Maker. Those of us who still believe in freedom must take a stand, must get involved. We must vote in those who believe in freedom; vote out those who do not; and join boards, committees, councils so a conservative voice might be heard on matters like freedom of speech and private property rights. Good people black and white are needed to preserve liberty for all people, to undo the harm the race baiters do. We will all be slaves if we do nothing.

Nettie Mudd’s biography not only gives the reader insights into Dr. Mudd’s character but answers nagging questions about the assassination itself. Apparently the Mudds knew Booth fairly well before he shot Lincoln. Nettie quotes her mother, whom Samuel affectionately called Frank (for Frances), at length concerning controversial events that took place in the fall of 1864:

In a footnote that appears in the pages following the words quoted above, Nettie reiterates that Booth indeed stayed overnight at the Mudds in November of 1864. The horse purchased by Booth from the Mudds’ neighbor was eventually to be ridden by Herold the night he attempted to assassinate Secretary of State Seward.

Dr. Mudd’s counsel, General Thomas Ewing , was an eloquent speaker and did a creditable job of defending Mudd, but his statements to the military court that tried Mudd, statements that are quoted by Nettie, are at variance with Frances Mudd’s account of the events leading up to and following the assassination. Ewing told the military tribunal that there was no evidence "of Booth’s having stayed all night with the accused (Dr. Mudd) on the visit when the horse was bought of Gardiner (Mudd’s neighbor), or at any other time..." Ewing stated to the court that one Colonel Wells was told by Mudd that Booth spent the night at Mudd’s Charles County farmhouse in November 1864, but Ewing dismissed this testimony because it was in conflict with the testimony of John Thompson who said that Booth had stayed with a Mr. Queen not with Samuel Mudd.

General Ewing did not appear to have been privy to all the facts related to occasions on which Mudd had met with Booth prior to the assassination. He argued before the tribunal that Mudd only saw Booth in November of 1864 and never saw him again after that. After the trial, Dr. Mudd himself admitted that he saw Booth in November and again the next month in Washington, D.C. Mudd verified that he at one point had a "casual meeting with Booth in front of one of the hotels on Pennsylvania avenue, Washington, D.C. on the 23rd of December, 1864." During the trial, a man named Weichmann testified that he and John Surratt bumped into Booth and Mudd on Seventh Street in Washington not in December but one January night. Weichmann said that Mudd upon seeing Surratt called out Surratt’s name and that Surratt recognized Mudd "as an old acquaintance." Weichmann related that Booth invited everyone to his room at the National Hotel for wine and cigars and that Mudd and Booth had a private conversation lasting "ten to twenty minutes."

While Dr. Mudd in a statement from his prison cell at Fort Jefferson in Florida denied any such private conversation with Booth in a hotel room in December or January or at any time in Washington D.C. , Mudd, I think somewhat implausibly, did state that he accidentally bumped into Booth on Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. on December 23rd and that Booth asked Mudd to introduce him, Booth, to John Surratt who was living in the city at that time (something Dr. Mudd insisted he didn’t know until Booth informed him of the fact then and there). Booth had Surratt’s address, but Mudd was not inclined to oblige him with an introduction to Surratt. In a strange twist of fate, Booth and Mudd, after having met by accident, according to Dr. Mudd’s statement, proceeded to run into Surratt and Weichmann just moments later. Washington was a small Southern city in the 19th century, but it wasn’t that small.

That Mudd’s meetings with Booth and Surratt that December day in 1864, as a bloody war was nearing its end, were entirely accidental seems doubtful. What remains certain, however, is that Dr. Mudd is one of the most complicated, misunderstood and fascinating figures in American history.

To Be Continued

Old Soldiers Home...Once a Proud Maryland Landmark

There aren’t enough hours in the day to do justice to Maryland’s Confederate history. I am constantly surprised by new facts about the state’s authentic past. Having just begun research on the Maryland Line Confederate Soldiers’ Home in Pikesville, not far from Baltimore, I thought I would share what I have unearthed so far.

Almost forgotten now, at one time this facility held an important place in the hearts of Marylanders and other Southerners. But as a young school girl, I never heard about the home even though I was taught Maryland "history" in the primary grades. My Confederate heritage was denied me it appears.

Though little is made of the home, there is some information about it on the internet, and there have been books written about it as well.

The buildings in which the facility was located date back to the year 1818 when they were used as a Federal arsenal. This alone would have qualified the site as a place to be preserved, possibly to be converted to a museum if anyone had cared. In 1888 Maryland’s branch of the Society of the Army and Navy of the Confederate States, with the help of Maryland lawmakers who revered the Southern veterans, established a home for Southern soldiers at the site. The Society, which would not admit any deserters or "unworthy soldiers" to join its ranks, was formed in 1871 to "preserve the material for a truthful history of the late war between the Confederate States and the United States of America" and to honor those who had died in defense of the South and those Southern veterans who had come upon hard times (from the Confederate Veteran February 1893)."

The article states that the Society was instrumental in securing from the Legislature of Maryland in 1888 the former United States Arsenal buildings at Pikesville for use as a Confederate Home, supported by an annual appropriation of $5, 000. The article also says that the rooms at the home were furnished as "memorial offerings " and that the home was a haven to old Southern veterans "from different states, but citizens of Maryland at time of entry." According to the Maryland Historical Society’s MLCS Home Webpage, there were 139 residents at the home at the end of the first five years of its operation. Sheltering aged soldiers until 1932, the home provided to its residents " a place of special pride...the relic room, where trophies and memorabilia were displayed along with portraits of confederate military leaders including Harry Gilmor, Henry Little, Lloyd Tilghman, Isaac Trimble, William Murray and Raphael Semmes."

The MHS’s collection contains photographs of the facilities and residents of the home, portraits of CSA regiment "reunions and outings" as well as images of the memorabilia from the relic room. The webpage is interesting, and visitors are invited to "browse digital images" there. (Just type in key words: Confederate Home Pikesville Maryland on a search engine like Yahoo or Google)

At the Maryland Office of the Secretary of State/Maryland State Archives webpage, I learned that there was a large cross bottony (this is one of the accepted spellings of the word) over the gate in front of the home. Where that cross bottony is now is an interesting question for a researcher to attempt to answer. This webpage, however, not surprisingly is shot through with revisionist "balance" and the usual tired references to Maryland’s divided sympathies and the reconciliation of pro-Union and pro-Southern factions in the state after the bloody conflict...the usual sophomoric, ill-considered stuff about Maryland and the War.

But back in the days when the MLCS Home was in operation, the sentiments were not so mild. The Confederate Veteran of November 1893 quoted William Pope, superintendent of the home, as saying:

"Now a little insight into the way we do things in Maryland: We have no ex-Confederate Societies, but several strong active Confederate Societies. We never mix in any manner with the other side - have no joint reunions, no joint banquets, no decoration or memorial days in common. In fact we do not mix at all, we go our own way they go theirs…. We do not belong to that class of Confederates that believe they were right. We knew we were right in 1861. We knew we were right when the war closed and we know we are right today." (quoted on October 17, 1893).

So much for kissing and making up in the Old Line State after the cannonade smoke had cleared.

The Home is now the site of the Maryland State Police Barracks in Pikesville. In 1945 the Baltimore County Public Library was built on a portion of the grounds of the facility.

Soon I am going to take a trip up that way to see if there is a marker commemorating the home...maybe I’ll find the cross bottony. A rank neophyte concerning the Pikesville home, I will share what I learn with those who are interested as my research continues.

I have a feeling that there is so much more to say about this piece of Southern history. And I also have a hunch that if all the Confederate artifacts, photographs, portraits, manuscripts, records in our state could be gathered together under one roof ,and Maryland’s story could be told there with displays and exhibits, we would have a museum that would rival the one in Richmond. I don’t think anyone really knows just how rich in Confederate history Maryland is, just how blessed we are as Marylanders.

This commentary was prepared with the kind assistance of J.B. Couch of the Vincent Camalier Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Next Week: A Quiz!

A Rebel Rose By Any Other Name

It was a dark and gloomy afternoon when my first edition Rebel Rose: Life of Rose O’Neal Greenhow Confederate Spy arrived. Authored by Ishbel Ross and published in 1954, it is the definitive biography of Mrs. Greenhow. When I called the bookstore at New Market Battlefield Museum in Winchester, Virginia, and a very helpful lady told me she had a first edition hard cover in stock, I couldn’t resist buying it. Such spendthrift ways no doubt will get me thrown out in the street one of these days...but when the sheriff comes to put me out, a first edition Ross, its handsome Confederate red dust jacket still in good condition, will be among my otherwise pitiful possessions.

Later that day, as it began to drizzle, I sat down to read my book to refresh my memory on so many details of the life of "so noted a rebel." Most importantly, I needed to solve the mystery ... controversy actually...about her early life, her birthplace. Historians cannot even agree on the spelling of her name let alone where the famous Southern spy was born. But I knew that the answers or clues to the answers could be found in the Ross biography, and since I had lost my paperback edition many years ago, I was glad at last to be able to read it again.

In the introduction I found just what I was looking for: Ross, a native of Scotland and biographer of many famous Americans, had interviewed direct descendants of Greenhow, including Greenhow’s great grandson, Colonel L.E. Marie. These are the people who told her that Rebel Rose was born in Charles County, Maryland sometime in 1817 (or late 1816) and that when her father was killed by a servant, the family, including young Rose, broke up housekeeping and moved. Since no one can conclusively prove (and I will admit I am wrong if this evidence surfaces) that she was born in Montgomery County— only that she lived there— and since Ross got it from the horse’s mouth so to speak that she was born in Port Tobacco, Maryland, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, this must stand. I am continuing to research the subject and have just discovered the Barbee papers at Georgetown University. In this collection, there is correspondence written by Mrs. Lee D. Marie, Mrs. Greenhow’s granddaughter and L.E Marie’s mother. Maybe the birthplace puzzle will be solved by these letters.

As a good friend and well-respected genealogist has suggested to me, I want Greenhow to have been born in Port Tobacco. This is true. But admitting that, I still think I can make my case. In the early 1950s when Ross was doing her research, people were closer to the events of the WBTS than we are today. I recently learned that Mrs. Lee D. Marie was still alive when the biography was published. Although Ross didn’t mention talking to her, she did interview individuals who knew Greenhow’s life intimately. In her acknowledgments in the front of the book, she writes:

I have drawn material for this biography from numerous sources on both sides of the Atlantic, and am indebted to a number of librarians, curators and historians for generous aid in assembling facts on Mrs. Rose O’Neal Greenhow.

Among direct descendants and others by marriage who have supplied me with information are Mrs. Greenhow’s great-grandson Colonel L.E. Marie, Jr., and his wife, of Edgewater, Md., Mrs. Mary Greenhow Johnston of Richmond, Va., and Miss Cora B. Powell of Baltimore, Md.

After conducting meticulous research and talking to people in the position to know about Greenhow’s life, Ross concluded that she was born around 1817 and was just a few months old when her father was murdered. Ross writes:

"Rose O’Neale was little more than an infant when her father, John O’Neale, was killed by his Negro body servant in 1817. He was a planter with extensive lands at Port Tobacco, a small Maryland town brisk with shipping and commerce in the days before the Civil War but today a rural community. When his estate was broken up his family moved to Poolesville, and from there his daughters in time found their way to the capital."

There is evidence that lends some credibility to the idea that Rose was not necessarily born in Port Tobacco, but no one adequately proves this contention.

Ross also explains that Mrs. Greenhow was a direct descendant of "one of the Roman Catholic colonists who landed on the Western Shore in 1634.." Rebel Rose was an Ark and Dove Maryland native. And interestingly, in her biography’s title, Ross spells Mrs. Greenhow’s maiden name O’Neal, but in the first sentence of Chapter One, spells it with an e. Ross explains in Chapter One that when Rose was born, the family dropped the final e when Rose was very young.

There is information that counters my theories, but once again not conclusively as I have said. While skimpy if tantalizing snippets about her early life spur debates among historians and genealogists, her contributions to the Southern cause speak for themselves...although revisionists as I have said time and time again in this column will attempt to downplay her accomplishments as a spy. But the accolades she received from generals and Jefferson Davis himself put the lie to the yarns spun by those who hate real southern history and real southerners.

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of genealogist of note Linda Reno for providing background information for this article.

Next Week: More on Rebels, Spies and Lies

Last weekend, while visiting in the central highlands of Virginia, I ran into a Yankee, a New Yorker, who made a reference to Maryland being Up North. When I told him that Maryland was east not north of this part of Virginia, he looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. It is bad enough to be thought a Northerner by a Southerner, but it is intolerable to be thought a Northerner by a Northerner.

Back from my trip to Virginia, I was looking for information about Little Dixie, Kentucky when I encountered more ignorance concerning the location –and history—of Maryland at a website called Something About Everything Military. Owned by Hillard E. Johnmeyer, the site offers up information on the War Between the States as it relates to an area in Missouri called Little Dixie, a region which encompasses many counties and roughly falls south of the Mason Dixon Line. Johnmeyer’s webpage is interesting, but I was caught up short when I read this:

"…Although the majority of slaves ultimately came to be used for agricultural labor in the South, Northerners used slaves for their own agricultural production and as household servants in virtually every northern state. While most northern states had finally abolished slavery by the time of the Civil War, it is interesting to note that the Federal government did not require the northern citizens of Delaware or Maryland (or even the nation’s capitol, Washington, D.C.) to free their slaves, even after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863! Indeed, Lincoln’s proclamation only "freed" the slaves in the seceded southern states, but did not even mention freeing the slaves of the north."

A Missourian calling Maryland a Northern state is very strange especially since Missouri is today considered by many to be more Midwestern than Southern, and a Missourian of all people should understand how it feels to have one’s own geography —and history— misrepresented.

There are many parallels between what happened in the Show Me State and what happened in Maryland during the WBTS. On a website sponsored by the Missouri Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Commander-John Christensen, in presenting " an historically accurate portrayal of the Southern patriotism exhibited by Missourians during the War for Southern Independence" and "a few facts of history that modern, politically correct, "historians" conveniently leave out," tells a tale remarkably similar to Maryland’s story.

Christensen states that Missouri’s legislature actually voted to secede in October of 1861 after the people of the state had suffered many outrages at the hands of Yankee invaders:

"On the 10th of May in 1861, one of the most flagrant violations of civil rights ever perpetrated against the citizens of Missouri, occurred in St. Louis. On that date more than 8,000 immigrant troops, under the guise of being "federal volunteers", captured a small contingent of "Missouri Volunteer Militia". When a group of outraged citizens protested this highly illegal action, the mercenaries fired volley after volley into the crowd, killing 28 men, women, and children, and wounding 100 more. Among those killed were a 14 year old girl, and a young mother with a child in her arms. The result of this shocking, tyrannical outrage spurred the Missouri legislature into action, and within hours, a military bill that had been pending for months was passed, creating the ‘Missouri State Guard’…to defend Missouri from invaders from either section...North or South…The federal invaders were relentless in their pursuit of conquest, however, and in June 1861 expelled the legally elected State Government from Jefferson City."

Maryland also suffered outrages at the hands of the immigrant troops of the North, and her "legally elected State Government" was also expelled by the Yankees. It is heartening to know that other "border" state folks are struggling to tell the truth about their history , about who they really are, and, when I read of that struggle, I am more determined than ever to tell the truth about Maryland. And I haven’t forgotten about Little Dixie, Kentucky. I have had no luck so far, but my research continues. God bless the South… even Missouri.

Last week a friend gave me an old book entitled History of Maryland From Its Settlement to 1877. Of course, I was most interested in the War Between the States chapters. Published in 1879, only 14 years after the war, it had to have been written by an eye witness to the conflict and would lack the biases of modern textbooks, I reasoned. To the contrary, it was a study in "fair and balanced" history which is to say revised history. On the back cover the author is praised by various reviewers for his dispassionate treatment of Maryland’s past, when in fact he very plainly twists historical events to justify Lincoln’s invasion of the Old Line State.

Because I have a bad habit of reading several pages of a book before I think to look at the author’s name, it wasn’t until I had read all of the WBTS chapters that I noticed that Henry Onderdonk had written History of Maryland. This explained so much. Onderdonk is not a Southern name, and it is definitely not a Maryland name. . In researching him, I found that he had served as the head of the University of Maryland’s Agricultural School from 1861 to 1864 and that he was a native New Yorker, one of the conquering hordes who had occupied Maryland.

Onderdonk manipulates language to appear objective, but weaving his tangled web, he contradicts himself sometimes with humorous results. Here are some examples of old Henry’s history. See if you can detect the inconsistencies and the out and out lies in what he says.

"Notwithstanding their sympathy with their Southern brethren, the people of this State were not prepared to think they had sufficient cause to leave the Union, but insisted that they should contend for their rights in the union, and, therefore, were not willing to make their territory desolate in order to enforce an act of which many very strenuously denied the right and all doubted the wisdom."

The book is not annotated so the critical reader is left wondering on what Onderdonk bases his contention that all the people in Maryland considered secession unwise. And please note his implicit admission that the "union," that is the Yankee military dictatorship, was threatening the rights of the people of Maryland.

Concerning the Battle of Baltimore, Onderdonk mentions only the deaths of the invading Yankee soldiers and not the civilians who died defending the city. Amazingly, this is what he had to say about the aftermath of the battle:

In the very next paragraph, Onderdonk states that Maryland’s Governor Hicks, who was, Onderdonk says,"neutral" up to this point, seized weapons belonging to Baltimore militia fearing they would be used against the Yankee troops. :If there had been such a dramatic change in sentiment, why did Hicks have need of confiscating weapons?

Why was it necessary also, as Onderdonk tells us, for Yankee gunboats to be aimed at Baltimore well into the war if the city were "loyal" to Lincoln’s regime.

The most illogical statement, however, that Onderdonk makes is this:

"But notwithstanding the decided stand in behalf of the Union—which, by preserving the capital of the Republic to the Federal Government in the beginning of the war, had saved that government from total overthrow—and, notwithstanding this decided majority for the Union candidates, the administration, while calling Maryland a loyal State, acted upon the theory that she would, if supported by the Southern army, unite with the South, and press her hard with its military hand."

But the South did not seek the overthrow of "the government;" she only sought to exercise her right to withdraw from the union, a right recognized by Northern states such as New York before the war. The Southern states wished only to depart in peace from a union they had voluntarily joined in the first place. The election to which Onderdonk refers was not a free election as Yankee troops were stationed at polls intimidating voters and even voting themselves. Read the quote again. Did you notice that Onderdonk is saying that Maryland was loyal to the union, but she wasn’t loyal to the union? In the same breath he contradicts himself. This is what happens when revisionists write history…The truth is often a bitter pill to swallow, but it always makes sense.

Corrections: I made two mistakes in my last column, Embattled Battle Flag Waves On. I wrote "of work of art" instead of "a work of art," and I wrote "pity" instead of "pithy." My apologies. God Bless the South.

Next Time: Little Dixie, Kentucky?

At first I thought it was my imagination, but now I am convinced that lately I am seeing more Battle Flags in St. Mary’s County. An increasing number of Countians are displaying the old banner on the windows and bumpers of their cars and pickup trucks—mostly pickups. Many factors could account for the resurgence of Southern patriotism in St. Mary’s, but my theory is that since the flag and other Southern symbols appear mainly on the trucks of young male drivers, it is a matter of self-expression on the part of this displaced and disenfranchised segment of society. Discovering their Southern roots, they are defining themselves and rejecting the Yankee values of the larger American culture, a culture which considers them personae non gratae.

When I am driving along Route 235 in this now alien land, I am always happy to see one lane over on an old work truck, a defiant Cross of St. Andrew, hoping that it is a manifestation of true patriotism and an understanding of the war and the nation whose birth brought it about rather than just a "bad boy" affectation. But even if it is, it’s good to see the Southern colors on the road.

I wish I could see more flags flying on front lawns in St. Mary’s as well. But there are only a few. Down in the southern part of the county, there is at least one First National flying (not the Battle Flag but still a Southern emblem), and of course way down in the County the Battle Flag flies to commemorate the Southern dead at Point Lookout. Near Leonardtown. there is a Battle Flag,painted on the side of a building (last time I saw it, the paint was flaking off, but it was still of work of art to me). And also near Leonardtown, a First National graces the front of a small business. Finally, not long ago I was pleasantly surprised to see an old faded Battle Flag on a back road in Hollywood. Just a few flags are flown in St. Mary’s , but really just as many as are seen in the Northern Neck of Virginia. We are holding our own.

But we could do more to show our Southern pride and make Yankees mad at the same time. If anyone wishes to purchase a flag or patriotic bumper stickers, there are many places on the internet where they are available. One of my favorites is the Ruffin Flag Company in Georgia. They have a good selection including novelty items such as Confederate dog collars and leashes.

And at MakeStickers.com it is easy to design your own Southern bumper stickers. You don’t need to order them by the gross…you can buy any number even if it is just one. And there are many other sites too if this one doesn’t suit you.You can even scan in your own "rebel" graphics to use along with a pity saying or quotation. Might I suggest "Yankee Go Home," "Jeff Davis for President," or my personal favorite, "Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum! Maryland! My Maryland!" ( a line from our state song).

I would be disingenuous if I didn’t admit that it takes some courage to display Southern emblems, but at some point, we have to take a stand for what we believe even if that stand is a $4.00 bumper sticker.

In the spring and summer of 1861, the Abolitionist government in Washington turned its attention to St. Mary’s County and her old port of Leonardtown. Fortunately for students of history, the St. Mary’s Beacon, newspaper of record during the war years, preserves for us the events of those days just prior to and during the Yankee invasion and occupation. Featuring news reports and commentaries from the Northern and Southern press and articles of local interest, the existing issues (preserved on microfilm) of the Beacon provide us a window on a war growing ever distant, a conflict that as time goes by is increasingly the subject of the grossest misinterpretation on the part of the culpably ignorant (PA school marm types) and the cynically dishonest (liberal college professors and "historians," mainstream journalists, left wing and moderate politicians).

One Yankee now living in St. Mary’s remarked that the Beacon had "almost nothing" in it about the "Civil War" when quite easily a doctoral dissertation could be written—and should be written—on the exciting events chronicled in its pages.

The truth is that Maryland —and St. Mary’s County most especially— played an important role in the WBTS—so important that revisionists are faced with only two choices: ignore her history altogether or lie: Point Lookout was the Andersonville of the North; Maryland was neutral; Maryland was divided in sympathies; Maryland remained in the union so she could keep her slaves; Maryland is in the North; Maryland’s "Civil War" history is too complex to ever really know the truth about it (so I was told by a Washington Post writer a few years ago).

But there is nothing complex about what happened in Maryland’s Mother County to be sure. St. Mary’s was secessionist and, whether it makes modern folks wince or not, rabidly pro slavery. When news of Fort Sumter was received in the mail, the Beacon reports that…

On hearing the news about Sumter, oral history tells us that a group of Leonardtown men rode out to Mrs. Silence’s Tavern, near what is now the junction of Route 234 and Route 5 and drank and talked war into the night.

By the summer of 1861, the County was occupied by the Northerners and young men were crossing the Potomac to fight for the South. Because the Yankees arrested anyone attempting to "abscond" to Virginia, men would secretly gather in Leonardtown waiting for an opportune time to cross.

Leonardtown continued to be of great interest to the North and big city newspapers in the North. And closer to home in occupied Washington DC, once a proud Southern city, the Abolitionist Washington Star had much to say about Leonardtown’s Southern sympathies. After shiploads of Yankees landed at the Leonardtown Wharf and searched the village for stockpiles of weapons, the Star, as reported in the Beacon, cautioned that Leonardtown was a "sink hole of secession" and needed "watching."

The Star was correct in two respects: Leonardtown was a "rebel" town, and the Yankees were well advised to keep an eye on her if they wanted to keep Southern Maryland under the despot’s heel. Yankees eventually shut down the Beacon but not before the paper had recorded for later generations the simple, uncomplicated truth about the early years of the war in a small Southern town 150 miles or so below the Mason Dixon.

God bless the South.

Next Time: More on the Battle Flag

There is no more fascinating a figure in American history than Maryland’s Governor Thomas Hicks, a weak, indecisive fool, some revisionists insist, the voice of reason in a world gone mad according to other re-writers of the past. Neither characterization is accurate. The truth is that Hicks was an arrogant, word-parsing opportunist and a petty tyrant with big ambitions.

If we were to give Hicks the benefit of the doubt, we would call him naïve. Shortly after the 1860 presidential election, he attempted to ingratiate himself with the people of Maryland, whom he knew to lean heavily towards the Southern cause, while assuring them that Lincoln was not a threat to them:

Hicks in fact lied when he stated that he was doing the bidding of the people of Maryland –he was rather collaborating with the invaders— and admits that Maryland would have seceded if he had acted in accordance with the state constitution and if Yankee troops had not arrested state legislators. As Jefferson Davis tells us , "The conclusion is inevitable that [Hicks] kept himself in equipoise, and fell at last, as men without convictions usually do, upon the stronger side." Hicks sold his fellow Marylanders down river, changed the course of history and then quietly faded into obscurity, modernist historians finding him of little interest.

Next Time: Leonardtown: A Sink Hole of Secession

Three years ago in the spring, I was driving along Route 245 to Leonardtown when I spied some geese about to cross the road. Two adult birds and several goslings, they were emerging from a farmer’s field adjacent to the highway. Because I was raised in a Southern, Christian society and have regard for God’s creatures great and small, I slowed way down, pumping my brakes, carefully checking for the traffic behind me. As I prepared to stop, I checked my rearview mirror again and saw a silver SUV gaining on me rapidly. I thought anyone catching up to me would surely see my brake lights flashing on and off, so when I came to a complete stop, I was astonished to see the SUV pull onto the shoulder of the road headed straight for the geese in an attempt to pass me. At the last minute the driver swerved back onto the highway (having seen the birds) and was once again forced to follow behind me.

Since the Yankees have ruined our once beautiful, civilized county, I am not surprised at much that happens on the roadways where rudeness is the rule these days. But this wasn’t a case of rudeness as much as it was single-mindedness. Mary Chestnut, the great War Between the States diarist, once said of U.S. Grant, "He is not distracted by a thousand side issues; he does not see them. He is narrow and sure—sees only in a straight line." This was not a compliment; Mrs. Chestnut, being a Southerner, was actually criticizing his Yankee ways.

The new people to St. Mary’s and the county people who want to be the new people suffer from this same syndrome, this wanting to go in a straight line no matter what. And nowhere is this mentality more manifest than in their driving—they mash the accelerator taking off like bats out of Hades with no regard for what might walk, jump or waddle across their paths. Strapped into their luxury vehicles, their bottoms warmed by electric seats and listening to the exquisitely clear sound of state of the art radios, they possess a false feeling of invincibility, and they lack all sense of anything outside themselves or their immediate concerns. Like the SUV driver who tried to kill the baby geese—fuzzy, comical little things huddling nervously together…terrified— drivers today do not ask themselves why anyone up ahead might be slowing down and coming to a stop. They "think" only "Go fast, out of my way, must get there…"

Someone told me that geese were also dying in droves on roads in liberal-infested Northern Virginia which is odd since it is Yankee left-wing types who make such a fuss about animal rights. But urban (urban not urbane) Yanks have lost the ability if they ever had it to slow down and believe that those who stop for funeral processions or sit and talk on porches in the afternoon or yield to Canadian honkers crossing a busy road, are hopeless hayseeds. As for me, I am one hopeless hayseed who will continue to brake for baby geese… and even for Yankees.

Next Time: Stop Talking Yankee

Recently, I overheard two comments concerning Maryland that bear discussing. The comments, one made by a Southerner, the other by a Yankee, clearly illustrate the existential fog in which most people seem to be enveloped lately.

The Southerner’s comment concerning our state is the more egregious by virtue of the fact that he should know the Southland better than his offhand remark indicates he does. A Southerner should know the South. What I overheard him say was something to the effect that as long as he was in Maryland for a few days, he should probably have himself some lobsters. This was a deliberate misstatement and an insult to True Marylanders. He was calling us Yankees. His "faux pas" will seem trivial to carpetbaggers and the deracinated, but to those of us who still take a stand for our heritage, it was a slap in the face.

The second comment that I found noteworthy was made by a young girl…probably about 16 …who by her accent was from up North. She was fussing about the cold snap we had a while back implying that she wasn’t used to it and wishing that she were in South Carolina (where it was a balmy 7 degrees warmer than here). I have in this column mentioned previously the problem of Yankees pretending to be Southerners when they are in Maryland to call attention to themselves.

But, as I have also pointed out in this column, Maryland was once considered a Southern state by Yankee and Southerner alike. There are many reasons the Old Line State has been redefined, but no one can argue— sincerely at least— that a redefining has not taken place. Consider the sarcastic lobster remark of two weeks ago; then consider the words of a Mississippian in the early 1900s.

And she continues:

The South once claimed Maryland as her own. Now we are as unloved in this region as a red-headed step child. But why bother documenting that Maryland was viewed much differently in the past than she is today? Maryland’s cultural cleansing matters very little or not at all to most. But to those of us who abjure the Yankee realm and Yankee lies, and more importantly, understand what motivates the lies and the consequences of those lies, defending a small Southern state’s heritage is perhaps the most important thing we can do.

Maryland History Written in Stone

Cynthia Buck-Thompson of the Richard Thomas Zarvona Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was kind enough to direct me to a webpage where I found an inventory of the Confederate memorials in Maryland. It is important to acknowledge these monuments to Maryland’s brave Southern fighters now because it is entirely possible that at some point in the future they will either be destroyed or allowed to decay from neglect. The aggressive rewriting of Maryland’s history proceeds at a rapid pace. "Civil War Trails" signage is going up all over the state and for the most part tells a tale vastly different from the true history of Maryland’s heroic and tragic struggle against Northern invasion.

But as long as Maryland’s Confederate memorials stand, the truth will be known. There are, to be sure, Union monuments in our state as well, but the question of just how many native-born Marylanders voluntarily served the Union goes unanswered. Real Maryland boys, entirely of their own accord, left behind families at the mercy of Yankee occupation forces and marched into battle for the South. No one coerced them, enticed them, paid them, transported them from the slums of Europe in order for them to lay down their lives for Constitutional liberty and for the South.

For those interested in learning more about memorials to these brave men, there is a book which also documents our Maryland Confederate monuments. It is entitled Lest We Forget. I have added it to my reading list and hope my readers will do the same.

And, here is a partial list of Confederate memorials in Maryland based on the information provided by the Maryland Secretary of State’s website. For a complete listing, just type in the key words Maryland Civil War Monuments in an internet search engine to visit the site for yourself.

Allegheny County

Confederate Stone Shaft, Rose Hill Cemetery, Cumberland, Maryland.

Baltimore City

Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Mount Royal Avenue at Mosher Street; Confederate Women Monument, University Parkway and Charles Street; Lee-Jackson Monument, Art Museum Drive and Wyman Park, Loudon Park Cemetery; Confederate Dead Monument, Loudon Park Cemetery; Confederate Mothers and Widows Monument, Loudon Park Cemetery; Confederate Women Monument, Loudon Park Cemetery; Confederate Prisoner of War Monument, Loudon Park National Cemetery.

Frederick County

Confederate Monument; Maryland Soldiers of the Union and Confederacy Monument; Confederate Unknown Soldier Statue; Frederick County Confederates Tablet.

Howard County

Confederate Monument, Courthouse Grounds, Ellicott City, Maryland.

Kent County

Soldiers of Kent in the Federal and Confederate Armies Monument, Memorial Park, High Street, Chestertown, Maryland.

Montgomery County

Confederate Dead Obelisk, Grace Episcopal Church, Silver Spring, Maryland; Confederate Soldier Monument, Rockville, Maryland; Davis Plaque, Cabin John, Maryland; Confederate States of America Monument.

Talbot County

Confederate Monument, Washington Street, Easton, Maryland.

Washington County

1st Maryland Battery, CSA; Baltimore Battery, CSA; Lee Headquarters Marker, Boonsboro-Shepherdstown Pike, Sharpsburg, Maryland; Washington Confederate Cemetery, Hagerstown, Maryland.

Next Time: An Eastern Shore Girl

Jefferson Davis on Maryland and

The first and only president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, a flawed Southern hero it could be said, published his memoirs in 1881. Born in Kentucky (as was his nemesis Abraham Lincoln) and once married to a woman with Maryland roots (his first wife), Davis has been criticized for not listening to generals in the field when he should have listened and for other shortcomings. A more lackluster historical figure than Lee and Jackson, Davis nevertheless possessed a towering intellect and commanded respect even if grudging at times. His two -volume work entitled the Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government is a first hand report on the events of the War Between the States. His prose, unlike the flowery, melodramatic stuff of some Victorian writers of memoirs, is clear and unsentimental.

For students of Maryland history, Davis writes at length about the invasion and occupation of the Old Line State by Yankee troops. Davis has much to say about Maryland’s spineless Governor Hicks who was neither a Union man nor a secessionist but an oily opportunist who watched which way the wind blew before he acted or spoke.

In Volume 1, Chapter 5 of his memoirs, Davis talks about Maryland’s attempt to broker peace in the early months of the secession crisis:

But Hicks seemed in these early days to feel no allegiance to the North:

Indeed Hicks might have been mistaken for a Rebel firebrand. Davis writes:

This Governor Hicks was saying that Maryland and her sister Border States would secede if the Yankees didn’t end their attempts to oppress the Southern people through the levying of exorbitant tariffs and other unconstitutional actions. This Governor Hicks vowed "to make common cause" with other states to resist tyranny, in other words, to secede from the Union if the Yankees did not capitulate to demands for a return to Constitutional government.

But when the Yankees stopped a vote on secession by the Maryland legislature in Frederick, Maryland in 1861, Hicks changed his tune. Davis writes:

Hicks could have been a Southern hero rather than the almost forgotten figure he became. Maryland was of great importance to the North. That is why the Yankees moved quickly to conquer the state. Hicks might have thwarted their invasion had he been a real leader —as he initially appeared to be —and would have secured for himself a measure of immortality.

Is Secession

Hannity and Colmes , this week, interviewed an articulate, intelligent young man who is organizing an emigration of 10,000 Christians to South Carolina in order to change politics in that Southern state for the better. But what is really interesting about the group’s plan is that they are advocating the eventual secession of South Carolina from the union (they have their work cut out for them…Yankees are flocking to the Palmetto State in droves). The socialists and Northern neo-conservatives running our nation consider such secessionist talk crazy, dangerous…something lunatics on the fringe threaten to do…but seceding from the union was a Constitutional right way back when some Yankee states considered it— during the War of 1812 and the Mexican War of the 1840s— when, in the 1860s, most of the Southern states left the union, mainly over tariffs and abuses of federal power, and remains a right to this day.

Alan Colmes, who is normally glib and sarcastic, had very little to say to the Christian secessionist. He had little to say, because he, like most liberals-socialists, when confronted with real conservatives who understand Constitutional principles, gets boxed into a rhetorical corner and finds himself stuttering and stammering. Secessionists are too smart for the likes of Colmes. They wish no ill will to socialist America; they just wish to depart this degenerate, totalitarian nation and pursue the dream of the founders of our country.

The Bean family under a grape arbor by Theodore Horydzcak, Library of Congress

A Confederate Soldier’s Story

William Nash of Westmoreland County, Virginia was a poor man, hardly an ancestor about which to brag it would seem. In the 1860 Census, his occupation was given as "laborer." He was my great great grandfather, a poverty- stricken, thirty- eight year old drummer boy, and I am very proud of him.

Enlisting in the 47th Infantry, Company C, in 1861, William, being poor, of course owned no slaves so it is unlikely that he was fighting to preserve slavery. At the time of his enlistment, his son Bushrod Smith Nash was about eleven years old, and, it is conceivable, that by the war’s end, he was fighting for the South as well. I haven’t had time to do the research on Bushrod’s service to the Confederacy, but I will someday.

On June 20, 1862, William died of illness near Richmond. He left behind Bushrod, his other children, and his wife, Alice Melinda Mothershead Nash, who would eventually receive a pension from the state of Virginia. I don’t know where Alice is buried or William either. I believe they were Baptist, but they might have been Methodist. I have searched the burial records for Westmoreland and neighboring counties but have not had any luck in finding these long-dead kinsmen.

Bushrod Nash married Maria Dyer from St. Mary’s County after the war. At that time, unlike today, Westmoreland and St. Mary’s were sister counties united by cultural, familial and political ties. Bushrod’s granddaughter, my aunt, told me that "Grandpapa," as she called him, was ordinary…that there was not much to him. But, how sad it is that she, like so many of us, was unable to rise above bitterness towards errant or disappointing family members long enough to ask questions about past events that would shed light on so many mysteries. St. Mary’s County people have labored for so long to shake off the dust of what they have considered their humble backwoods upbringing, they have forgotten to ask questions of those who lived the most tragic and important event in American history. Had anyone bothered to ask Grandpapa about the war, we would now know if in fact he served, following in his dead father William’s footsteps. We would know perhaps what it was like waiting to no avail for William to come home and if his family went hungry during the war and the grim details of surviving in his absence. We would have learned about the final days, the desperation of the South and if boys as young as 15 in Westmoreland County were called on to defend the state from the Yankees. We might have learned where William and Melinda were laid to rest.

Indifference has left some of us piecing together a heritage for ourselves. When my mother was a child in the 1930s, there were still old Confederate Vets around in St. Mary’s County who could have shed light on our past, who could have told us more about who we were, who we are. But St. Mary’s Countians, denying our Southern roots and concerning ourselves with Yankee materialism, haven’t bothered asking about our past. Now we are bereft of it. We have trouble defining ourselves. Unwilling or unable to claim our Southern birthright, we are left then with nothing…we are the pale creatures Fugitive Poet and Southern Agrarian Andrew Lytle spoke of; we are T.S. Elliot’s hollow men...some of us are drunks…some of us spend our lives in pursuit of the meaningless trappings and one-upmanship of the secular world…these are the ways we quell the rage we feel at what we have lost, at our nothingness.

One or two of us stubbornly hang on…eccentrics reviled by almost everyone sticking up for a land that doesn’t even claim us. We are more pitiful than old Rebels in Texas or Georgia; we must fight for the right to mourn our cultural, historical loss; we must fight to establish that we are Southerners. We are told by the ignorant and presumptuous that we are not the children of those who defended the South and battled tyranny. But a handful of us will go to our graves raging against their lies and proud that we are the descendants of the Tidewater cavaliers and old drummer boys who gave their lives for freedom.

Last week, on WBAL in Baltimore, I heard a commercial advertising a natural food supplement that provides, supposedly, all the benefits of a diet rich in tomatoes. The Yankee voice in the commercial, in making the case for taking the supplement for good health, asked rhetorically (and I am paraphrasing), "After all, who wants to eat that many tomatoes?" and "Give me a break, tomatoes for breakfast?"

Growing up in St. Mary’s, I remember many a breakfast that included ‘matuses as some folks called them (Flannery O’Connor wrote that people in Georgia used this pronunciation at least as late as the 1960s). And one breakfast stands out from all the rest. I was very young—probably eight or nine if not younger—and it was the 1950s. I walked up to my Aunt Delma’s house. It was an era devoid of the 24-7 blaring of the TV and the noise of insistent AC systems; a hush so typical of summer mornings in old St. Mary’s had settled on her house; curtains lifted with a quiet breeze. It was a time far removed from the madness we call living today. As I sat at her kitchen table, she fixed me a whole platter of perfect ripe tomato slices, still warm from the sun. I was from a large family and such hospitality meant a great deal to me; it made me feel special. And I had never had such delicious tomatoes before nor have I since.

Southerners, and that includes Marylanders (real ones), know dozens of ways to fix tomatoes. For breakfast, my mother fried them in lard. And though she did use green tomatoes, more often she fried the ones that were somewhere between green and ripe. I had some fried tomatoes down in Charleston not long ago, but they didn’t hold a candle to my mother’s.

Also for breakfast, old time Maryland cooks would serve tomato gravy and tomato and biscuit sandwiches…my mother’s specialty. When we lived on a tobacco farm in Hollywood, Mama would make up a batch of biscuits using self-rising flour and lard and water. She would roll out the biscuits by hand (Southern cooks do not use a biscuit cutter). After they were cooked to a golden brown, she would split them, butter them and place a ripe tomato slice between the mouth watering halves. It is a good thing my mother was such a consummate cook because at times tomato biscuits were all we had for our meals, but we did not mind because of her culinary skills. A Southern cook can make a feast out of thin air it seems. And if someone shows up unexpectedly at supper time, a few more biscuits and a slice or two more of ‘matuses will make a plenty for all.

Recipe

I have discovered that the hothouse tomatoes in the supermarkets today actually make pretty good frying tomatoes because they are not really ripe. I suggest slicing them fairly thick, dipping them in beaten egg seasoned with salt and pepper, dredging in cornmeal mix and frying in oil in a heavy iron skillet until golden on both sides. Salt generously. The tomatoes can be kept warm in the oven while more are being fried.

This Earth, This Realm,

Smoking has been banned from all public places in the Big Apple. It is typical of Yankees that they concern themselves with such minutiae, but what is happening up there is even too crazy for Northerners. The cigarette police can at any moment show up at a place of business and cite the owners for ashtrays sitting out on counters or tables or even stored in the back on shelves. But Yankees are not satisfied to work mischief in their North; they have to impose their Yankee ways on what they perceive as the poor benighted South. We in Maryland, where tobacco has been grown for almost 400 years, have been set upon by overzealous carpetbaggers who are on fire over smoking. A few months ago a local woman caused quite a stir at St. Mary’s Hospital for placing an unlit cigarette (she gave no indication of planning to light it) in her mouth. She was ordered to remove the offending and still unlit object. I think the Yankees running that hospital are a particularly virulent breed of totalitarian…they have pitched Christmas trees out the door and have, in a snit, removed photographs of tobacco barns from the hospital walls. I miss the old polluted St. Mary’s where smoking was allowed, and people were friendly...and free.

I am homesick for the old Maryland and tired of the ridicule the state receives from Yankee and Southerner alike. Some Southerners today are just as ignorant of Southern history and heritage and even geography as Northerners are or else they would not hate the Old Line State the way they do. Well-educated Southerners know where the South is and what it is.

If the South is to survive as a region, a nation, we must preserve our dying aristocracy. Well-read smart Southern leaders are needed to counter the relentless attacks on Southern culture and the reinventing of the South out of whole cloth. Yankees are likely to triumph over us because Southerners are preoccupied—fighting among ourselves—acquiescing to the vandal’s values or just plain not bothering to learn the truth about our own culture, our own Southern heritage. A TV anchor recently said of Virginia that it wasn’t all that Southern anymore. And there is a webpage called The Dixie Line that states that Kentucky is the most "un-Southern state" there is . The same site had less than flattering things to say about Maryland as well.

Southern culture has been high jacked by the lower stratum of Southern society. A beer-swilling, pot-bellied churl scratching and cussing and painting the South with broad brush strokes in his ignorance has replaced the bourbon-sipping polymath who, in the nuanced voice of the educated Southerner, sat on long ago porches with friends speaking of history and politics late into sticky summer evenings, whippoorwills haunting the blackness, heat lightening flashing off in the distance.

The Southern aristocracy has all but vanished, their children and grandchildren embracing Yankee speech and customs and materialism. Many Southerners with good intentions do more harm than good when they attempt to defend Southern ways. They accept the Yankee perception of the Southerner as uneducated, illiterate and, thumbing their noses at Northerners, proudly proclaim they don’t care to be uppity and high class. These Southerners have unfortunately accepted the question- begging assertion by Northerners that the latter are educationally superior. Southern culture is not easily understood by Yankees because they lack all subtlety mistaking some Southern propensities – the deliberate use of non-standard English for effect, the pride in genteel poverty, the need for an uncomplicated existence—for shortcomings instead of the strengths they are. They fail to understand that Southern culture is not monolithic. As in any other society, there are high born, average and low born people. But, in the South, unlike the North, wealth is not the most important criterion for determining social status.

Shakespeare wrote of "This Earth, This Realm, This England" because he knew that England drew strength from both the common man and the ruling classes. This was true of the South at one time, but today she is left with a whole lot of the former, a weak, deracinated aristocracy and hordes of meddling busybody Yankee newcomers who are very determined.

Calhoun scholar, tenured professor, Dr. Clyde Wilson, explained more eloquently than anyone I’ve ever come across what it is that Yankees really want with the South. Dr. Wilson says that while the North and South co-existed peacefully with a few rare exceptions after the War Between the States ended, Northerners are running amuck lately. In a 2001 essay published online he contends:

But the South fractured as it is cannot stand up effectively to the onslaught of Yankee interlopers intent on destroying us. We need the salt of the Earth folks who might be a little rough around the edges—I intended no offense to our churlish friend above—we need good decent people in the middle, and we need men of letters like Dr. Wilson to lead us. God help us when we can no longer find Southerners of his stature.

Carry me back to Old Virginny,

That’s where the cotton and the corn and taters grow,

That’s where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,

That’s where the Yankees all seem to want to go.

Many true blooded St. Mary’s Countians are moving across the Potomac, seeking asylum in Virginia’s Northern Neck and adjacent areas and fleeing the Yankee culture imposed upon us here. The problem is that those who have culturally cleansed us have set their sites on Virginia as well. Tragically, the Virginians who long ago knew who we were and would have recognized a Northern poseur claiming Maryland roots in a New York minute, now lump us and the Yankees in the same category calling anyone new a Come Here (St. Mary’s County people it must be noted call our carpetbaggers Away From Heres)

It would now appear that St. Mary’s Countians are without a homeland: We can’t stay here and be driven insane by a vile Yankee culture but neither can we live anywhere else in the South where people won’t know who we are and will despise us. Our neighbors across the river assume that everyone who moves there is going to start clamoring for change because that is what Yankees do…Yankees are overly precise busybodies and won’t leave well enough alone. Fifty years from now the culture in most of the Old Dominion will have been altered to such a degree that Carolinians will complain about that Yankee state just to the north... then the real Virginians will know how we Marylanders feel today.

But if moving away is not a solution to the Yankee infestation problem, then what is? One solution might be for bona fide St. Mary’s people to stay put but circle our wagons in the most remote area of the county we can find: the Seventh or maybe Ridge. Or better yet, we could move to Ridge or the Seventh and secede from St. Mary’s County. Or, establishing an enclave of real Countians, black and white, we could secede from the U.S.

Let’s say we establish our gated city-state down in Ridge (it would be similar to the Wildewood Retirement Community only with lots of Ford pickup trucks gaily festooned with Battle Flags and First Nationals), how would we then determine who would be fit to join our Southern settlement? Our Band of Brothers and Sisters? How would we keep undesirables like Yankees and Liberated Women out?

Maybe we could have an application form. Here are some possible questions to ask: those who wish to emigrate to our colony:

Do you believe in the right to carry?

Who is your granddaddy? Your great granddaddy?

Which unit did your great great granddaddy serve in under General Lee? (If your gg granddaddy was in bondage, was he in service to quality or white trash?)

How do you feel about mixed marriages (that is a Yankee and a Southerner marrying each other)?

If you are male, have you ever gotten drunk and terrorized defenseless women and children? (If yes, don’t bother completing application; we would just turn you down)

If you are female, are you a grasping solipsistic shopaholic who brags she doesn’t "do cooking" and makes her husband’s life unmitigated hell? (Likewise don’t bother completing rest of application)

How do you celebrate the major Southern holidays: General Lee’s Birthday, Stonewall Jackson’s Birthday, Dale Earnhardt’s Birthday? Christmas?

What happened on February 18, 2001? Do you believe that Nascar is still a Southern sport?

Do you believe that mannish, smart mouthed children should be smacked on their derrieres occasionally?

Have you named any of your children Caitlyn, Katelyn or some form thereof or Michaela?

Do you believe children should say "Yes Ma’am" and "No Sir" and should avoid knocking down adults in their path?

Do you allow your children to watch Rug Rats?

Do you think it is ok to smoke a cigarette while waiting in the lady’s room line?

Have you ever used the expression "you guys"?

What is your favorite possum recipe? Squirrel recipe?

Do you have a can of WD 40 under your zink?

Do you have a bottle of hot sauce and a jar of cayenne pepper in your kitchen cupboard?

Have you ever dropped sticks and picked up ground leaves? Can you tell a canvas back from a redhead from 100 yards? Can you tune up a 1972 135 horsepower Evinrude? Can you repair a gill net? Can you predict a squall an hour before it hits?

What is your favorite Mahalia Jackson song?

Do you think Catholics need a little fire and brimstone old time Baptist preaching now and again just for good measure?

Yankees, Illegal and Legal Immigrants (Except Australians), Southerner Wannabees, Wife Beaters, People Unkind to Children, Conspicuous Consumers, Slicks in Pleated Trousers and Tasseled Loafers, Liberals, Neo-Pagans, Trotskyites Need Not Apply

Come Heres, Away From Heres…Stay Heres?

Carry me back to Old Virginny,

That’s where the cotton and the corn and taters grow,

That’s where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,

That’s where the Yankees all seem to want to go.

Many true blooded St. Mary’s Countians are moving across the Potomac, seeking asylum in Virginia’s Northern Neck and adjacent areas and fleeing the Yankee culture imposed upon us here. The problem is that those who have culturally cleansed us have set their sites on Virginia as well. Tragically, the Virginians who long ago knew who we were and would have recognized a Northern poseur claiming Maryland roots in a New York minute, now lump us and the Yankees in the same category calling anyone new a Come Here (St. Mary’s County people it must be noted call our carpetbaggers Away From Heres)

It would now appear that St. Mary’s Countians are without a homeland: We can’t stay here and be driven insane by a vile Yankee culture but neither can we live anywhere else in the South where people won’t know who we are and will despise us. Our neighbors across the river assume that everyone who moves there is going to start clamoring for change because that is what Yankees do…Yankees are overly precise busybodies and won’t leave well enough alone. Fifty years from now the culture in most of the Old Dominion will have been altered to such a degree that Carolinians will complain about that Yankee state just to the north... then the real Virginians will know how we Marylanders feel today.

But if moving away is not a solution to the Yankee infestation problem, then what is? One solution might be for bona fide St. Mary’s people to stay put but circle our wagons in the most remote area of the county we can find: the Seventh or maybe Ridge. Or better yet, we could move to Ridge or the Seventh and secede from St. Mary’s County. Or, establishing an enclave of real Countians, black and white, we could secede from the U.S.

Let’s say we establish our gated city-state down in Ridge (it would be similar to the Wildewood Retirement Community only with lots of Ford pickup trucks gaily festooned with Battle Flags and First Nationals), how would we then determine who would be fit to join our Southern settlement? Our Band of Brothers and Sisters? How would we keep undesirables like Yankees and Liberated Women out?

Maybe we could have an application form. Here are some possible questions to ask: those who wish to emigrate to our colony:

Do you believe in the right to carry?

Who is your granddaddy? Your great granddaddy?

Which unit did your great great granddaddy serve in under General Lee? (If your gg granddaddy was in bondage, was he in service to quality or white trash?)

How do you feel about mixed marriages (that is a Yankee and a Southerner marrying each other)?

If you are male, have you ever gotten drunk and terrorized defenseless women and children? (If yes, don’t bother completing application; we would just turn you down)

If you are female, are you a grasping solipsistic shopaholic who brags she doesn’t "do cooking" and makes her husband’s life unmitigated hell? (Likewise don’t bother completing rest of application)

How do you celebrate the major Southern holidays: General Lee’s Birthday, Stonewall Jackson’s Birthday, Dale Earnhardt’s Birthday? Christmas?

What happened on Februray 18, 2000? Do you believe that Nascar is still a Southern sport? Who was on the pole at Talladega in 1993?

Do you believe that nasty little children should be smacked on their derrieres occasionally to cure their mannish ways and smart mouths?

Have you ever named any of your children Caitlyn, Katelyn or some form thereof or Michaela?

Do you believe children should say "Yes Ma’am" and "No Sir" and should avoid knocking down adults in their path?

Do you allow your children to watch Rug Rats?

Do you think it is ok to smoke a cigarette while waiting in the lady’s room line?

Have you ever used the expression "you guys"?

What is your favorite possum recipe? Squirrel recipe?

Do you have a can of WD 40 under your zink?

Do you have a bottle of hot sauce and a jar of cayenne pepper in your kitchen cupboard?

Have you ever dropped sticks and picked up ground leaves? Can you tell a canvas back from a redhead from 100 yards? Can you tune up a 1972 135 horsepower Evinrude? Can you repair a gill net? Can you predict a squall an hour before it hits?

What is your favorite Mahalia Jackson song?

Do you think Catholics need a little fire and brimstone old time Baptist preaching now and again just for good measure?

Essay

Yankees, Illegal and Legal Immigrants (Except Australians), Southerner Wannabees, Wife Beaters, People Unkind to Children, Conspicuous Consumers, Slicks in Pleated Trousers and Tasseled Loafers, Liberals, Neo-Pagans, Trotskyites Need Not Apply

Brit Hume, distinguished anchorman on Fox News’ nightly Special Report, commenting on the results of the recent Democratic primary in Virginia, so much as said that Virginia wasn’t all that Southern. Another lesser known Fox pundit during the course of that primary election week asserted that Virginia was not a Southern state but a "border" state.

I normally have tremendous respect for Fox even if the network’s correspondents and anchors murder the English language at times (not slips of the tongue but consistently bad grammar) and mis-use debating terms such as "begging the question." No matter, few TV personalities are highly literate these days it seems; at least Fox attempts to report real news. But even Fox needs a lesson in geography.

People don’t know how to use maps I guess. The Weather Channel staff certainly can’t. Neither can they make up their minds concerning the regions to which some states belong. Sometimes the Weather Channel meteorologists (who also fracture English) include West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia in the Northeast, sometimes the Mid-Atlantic. Once in a while they categorized West Virginia and Virginia as Southern states. One computer-generated graphic depicts the Northeast as a chunk of coastal real estate from Maine to Maryland with a big gaping hole where West Virginia and Northern Virginia have been torn away from their sister state Maryland.

Now when severe thunderstorms roll eastward across WV and Va., are we to believe that nobody in Maryland has to head for the storm cellar because we are nowhere near those two states? According to the Weather Channel, we are way up North somewhere next to Maine.

But if someone with even the most rudimentary education looks at a map, it should be obvious that this is a lot of nonsense, that Maryland is in the same geographical region as the other two states and that all three are in the South. A strip of Maryland only three miles wide lies farther north than Virginia, and, if Virginia is a Northern state, Robert E. Lee is turning over in his grave at such a revelation. The problem might be that maps though flat usually represent the curvature of the earth so Maryland looks farther north than it is.

Only recently has Maryland’s geographic designation been changed. Maryland’s culture is gone, our history re-written; now the revisionists and the ignorant would rob us of our very geography.

But just how could anyone lie about latitude? How can anyone say Maryland is a Northern state when our growing season is the same as the growing season of much of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia? This seems illogical, but then it is not a logical world.

The following data demonstrate how Maryland compares geographically to West Virginia and Virginia. The larger the number, the farther north the location. Note that West Virginia has the northernmost town.

MARYLAND

Baltimore AP 39° 11' N
Baltimore Co. 39° 20' N
Cumberland 39° 37' N
Frederick AP 39° 27' N
Hagerstown 39° 42' N
Salisbury 38° 20' N

WEST VIRGINIA
Beckley 37° 47' N
Bluefield AP 37° 18' N
Charleston AP 38° 22' N
Clarksburg 39° 16' N
Elkins AP 38° 53' N
Huntington Co. 38° 25' N
Martinsburg AP 39° 24' N
Morgantown AP 39° 39' N
Parkersburg Co. 39° 16' N
Wheeling 40° 7' N

VIRGINIA
Charlottesville 38° 2' N
Danville AP 36° 34' N
Fredericksburg 38° 18' N
Harrisonburg 38° 27' N
Lynchburg AP 37° 20' N
Norfolk AP 36° 54' N
Petersburg 37° 11' N
RichmondAP 37° 30' N
Roanoke AP 37° 19' N
Staunton 38° 16' N
Winchester 39° 12' N

Next Time: More on the Hunley and Maryland’s Pride Joseph Ridgaway

There is no more fascinating a figure in American history than Maryland’s Governor Thomas Hicks, a weak, indecisive fool, some revisionists insist, the voice of reason in a world gone mad according to other re-writers of the past. Neither characterization is accurate. The truth is that Hicks was an arrogant, word-parsing opportunist and a petty tyrant with big ambitions.

If we were to give Hicks the benefit of the doubt, we would call him naïve. Shortly after the 1860 presidential election, he attempted to ingratiate himself with the people of Maryland, whom he knew to lean heavily towards the Southern cause, while assuring them that Lincoln was not a threat to them:

Hicks in fact lied when he stated that he was doing the bidding of the people of Maryland –he was rather collaborating with the invaders— and admits that Maryland would have seceded if he had acted in accordance with the state constitution and if Yankee troops had not arrested state legislators. As Jefferson Davis tells us , "The conclusion is inevitable that [Hicks] kept himself in equipoise, and fell at last, as men without convictions usually do, upon the stronger side." Hicks sold his fellow Marylanders down river, changed the course of history and then quietly faded into obscurity, modernist historians finding him of little interest.

Next Time: Leonardtown: A Sink Hole of Secession

In the aftermath of the War Between the States thousands (no one seems to agree on just how many) of Southerners fled the new republic and the iron grip of Yankee imperialism and sought a better life in places like Mexico, Cuba, and Brazil.

These refugees from Northern tyranny were known as the Confederados, and today, their descendants still celebrate their Southern heritage.

In Brazil, many Southern exiles settled in Sao Paulo. And in Americana, Brazil the Southern heritage festivals are legendary featuring classic down home cuisine such as biscuits, grits and chess pie (apparently at least one refugee was a Kentuckian).

A handful of people in this tiny town, some of whom still speak we are told with a Southern accent, struggle to preserve their Southern heritage. But younger Brazilians, regrettably, are becoming more and more ignorant of the past, their past, and, if they care at all, seem to be somewhat influenced by popular misconceptions about the Southern cause.

There was considerable information on the Confederados on the internet. And, no surprise here, I found a predictably left-wing Washington Post piece on the subject and learned that Confederate refugees were invited to Brazil by Emperor Dom Pedro II and that a few years after the War, "several thousand Southerners were steaming for Brazil from the ports of New Orleans, Galveston, Tex., Charleston, S.C., Newport News, Va., and Baltimore."

But the 1999 article was not so much about the Confederados as it was about the evils of racism.

The author (who was not named) implied that contemporary Confederados have evolved over the years and are more enlightened than their gun-toting, hate-filled cousins in the American South who should probably be arrested for their views.

In my cursory internet investigation, I discovered that several books have been published on the subject of the Confederate refugees and that there is a Sons of Confederate Veterans unit called Os Confederados.

I regret I have neither time nor resources to travel to Brazil to met some of the descendants, but perhaps I could correspond with some of them to get more information.

I will attempt to do this and let my readers know what I learn.

In the meantime, I hope I have stirred some interest in this important topic.

And for those who wish to read more on the subject, here is an excerpt from an Amazon.com review of one book.

"Eugene C. Harter’s The Lost Colony of the Confederacy is the story of a grim, quixotic journey of twenty thousand Confederates to Brazil at the end of the American Civil War...Harter vividly describes the lives of these last Confederates who founded their own city and were called Os Confederados by the Brazilians. They retained much of their Southemness and lent an American flavor to Brazilian culture. The cultural province they established still exists as testimony to the hardiness of Southern ways.

"First published in 1985, this work details the background of the exodus and describes the life of the twentieth-century descendants, who have a strong link both to Southern history and to modem Brazil."

"Eugene C. Harter is retired from the U.S. Senior Foreign Service and lives in Chestertown, Maryland. He is the grandson and great-grandson of Confederates who left Texas and Mississippi as a part of the great Confederate migration in the late 1860s.

Smoking has been banned from all public places in the Big Apple. It is typical of Yankees that they concern themselves with such minutiae, but what is happening up there is even too crazy for Northerners. The cigarette police can at any moment show up at a place of business and cite the owners for ashtrays sitting out on counters or tables or even stored in the back on shelves. But Yankees are not satisfied to work mischief in their North; they have to impose their Yankee ways on what they perceive as the poor benighted South. We in Maryland, where tobacco has been grown for almost 400 years, have been set upon by overzealous carpetbaggers who are on fire over smoking. A few months ago a local woman caused quite a stir at St. Mary’s Hospital for placing an unlit cigarette (she gave no indication of planning to light it) in her mouth. She was ordered to remove the offending and still unlit object. I think the Yankees running that hospital are a particularly virulent breed of totalitarian…they have pitched Christmas trees out the door and have, in a snit, removed photographs of tobacco barns from the hospital walls. I miss the old polluted St. Mary’s where smoking was allowed, and people were friendly...and free.

I am homesick for the old Maryland and tired of the ridicule the state receives from Yankee and Southerner alike. Some Southerners today are just as ignorant of Southern history and heritage and even geography as Northerners are or else they would not hate the Old Line State the way they do. Well-educated Southerners know where the South is and what it is.

If the South is to survive as a region, a nation, we must preserve our dying aristocracy. Well-read smart Southern leaders are needed to counter the relentless attacks on Southern culture and the reinventing of the South out of whole cloth. Yankees are likely to triumph over us because Southerners are preoccupied—fighting among ourselves—acquiescing to the vandal’s values or just plain not bothering to learn the truth about our own culture, our own Southern heritage. A TV anchor recently said of Virginia that it wasn’t all that Southern anymore. And there is a webpage called The Dixie Line that states that Kentucky is the most "un-Southern state" there is . The same site had less than flattering things to say about Maryland as well.

Southern culture has been high jacked by the lower stratum of Southern society. A beer-swilling, pot-bellied churl scratching and cussing and painting the South with broad brush strokes in his ignorance has replaced the bourbon-sipping polymath who, in the nuanced voice of the educated Southerner, sat on long ago porches with friends speaking of history and politics late into sticky summer evenings, whippoorwills haunting the blackness, heat lightening flashing off in the distance.

The Southern aristocracy has all but vanished, their children and grandchildren embracing Yankee speech and customs and materialism. Many Southerners with good intentions do more harm than good when they attempt to defend Southern ways. They accept the Yankee perception of the Southerner as uneducated, illiterate and, thumbing their noses at Northerners, proudly proclaim they don’t care to be uppity and high class. These Southerners have unfortunately accepted the question- begging assertion by Northerners that the latter are educationally superior. Southern culture is not easily understood by Yankees because they lack all subtlety mistaking some Southern propensities – the deliberate use of non-standard English for effect, the pride in genteel poverty, the need for an uncomplicated existence—for shortcomings instead of the strengths they are. They fail to understand that Southern culture is not monolithic. As in any other society, there are high born, average and low born people. But, in the South, unlike the North, wealth is not the most important criterion for determining social status.

Shakespeare wrote of "This Earth, This Realm, This England" because he knew that England drew strength from both the common man and the ruling classes. This was true of the South at one time, but today she is left with a whole lot of the former, a weak, deracinated aristocracy and hordes of meddling busybody Yankee newcomers who are very determined.

Calhoun scholar, tenured professor, Dr. Clyde Wilson, explained more eloquently than anyone I’ve ever come across what it is that Yankees really want with the South. Dr. Wilson says that while the North and South co-existed peacefully with a few rare exceptions after the War Between the States ended, Northerners are running amuck lately. In a 2001 essay published online he contends:

But the South fractured as it is cannot stand up effectively to the onslaught of Yankee interlopers intent on destroying us. We need the salt of the Earth folks who might be a little rough around the edges—I intended no offense to our churlish friend above—we need good decent people in the middle, and we need men of letters like Dr. Wilson to lead us. God help us when we can no longer find Southerners of his stature.

In spite of a tornado watch and drenching rains, descendants of the Point Lookout prisoners gathered at Scotland, Maryland last week to honor their ancestors as they have been doing annually since the early 1990s. This year’s pilgrimage was special because it included the dedication of a new Confederate Memorial Park, which, according to PLPOW Descendants Organization president, Patricia Buck, was duly "sprinkled in holy water…blessed" and "baptized with wind and rain from Tropical Storm Hanna."

Though Patricia Buck always advertises that the event will be held rain or shine, she still received email after email asking if the pilgrimage was going to be re-scheduled. With so many people having taking off time from work, having traveled from great distances to attend, Buck says that there was "absolutely no way I could have canceled this event." And, in fact, many of the descendants found that standing in the mud buffeted by high winds was entirely appropriate and perhaps the most fitting memorial to the 8,000 to 14,000 thousand men who died at the prison depot established by the Union on occupied Maryland soil in the summer of 1863. Buck explains that "…our ancestors imprisoned in PL suffered so much more there...in the blistering sun, in the freezing snow and through several hurricanes without shelter…standing in the wind and rain to honor them, is a very humbling experience of which I am not even worthy."

In spite of the stormy weather, many of the ladies participating in the memorial event wore period dresses, and, in stark contrast to them, were the proudly disheveled POW re-enactors known as Lee’s Miserables. Year after year, they come to Point Lookout, and this year, as Buck says, they "were out there, barefooted, ragged and soaked to the bone." Buck reported no complaints but says she did hear "many people say that it just brought them a little closer to what their ancestors endured while imprisoned in Pt. Lookout."

The PLPOW organization was founded in 1991 and, along with the Camalier Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, has been sponsoring pilgrimages for 17 years. When the Veterans Administration prohibited the flying of the Confederate Battle Flag on a daily basis at the federal monument at Scotland, in 2003 the group purchased the land adjacent to the monument and began work on a new memorial park where the flag could fly every day. The VA had also censored speeches at the federal monument. At this year’s event, the unreconstructed Pastor John Weaver of Fitzgerald, Georgia delivered a decidedly uncensored keynote address that focused on the political issues of the War of Secession and the barbarous treatment of prisoners under the Lincoln regime. It is the truth about the unnecessary suffering of these Confederates that the PLPOW descendants dedicate themselves to telling and that keeps them coming back each year to honor their ancestors rain or shine.

Fiddle Dee Dee,

One rainy Sunday I decided to make a mess of collard greens. A mess is defined as "right much" or "right smart, " but, for the carpetbaggers surreptitiously reading this unrepentant rebel’s commentary, in Yankee terms that would be 1.9 kilograms at STP… unless it’s a humid summer day and , by Yimminy, youse goizes AC ain’t working, in which case, add .5 grams of greens to make you a mess.

But I digress. Real Southern women, who, by the way, can cook up a storm on the hottest day of the year without benefit of air conditioning, know instinctively how to make good greens with a nice piece of seasoning meat…fat back, streak of lean, ham hock. There is nothing as delicious as an old time country boiled supper with cornbread or biscuits, cucumbers and vinegar, sweet tea, banana pudding.

And there is something especially homey and comforting about putting on a mess of greens and listening to the rain fall rat a tat tat on the tin roof above. At times like these, a feeling of well-being infuses the Southern cook, who, toting a child on one hip, with her free hand expertly prepares a rib-sticking old country favorite for her family.

But, on the particular rainy Sunday in question, serenaded via cassette tape by Claude Debussy, international stylist composer of note if a frog, I had just set the ham hocks to boiling for a few minutes to extract the delightfully down home rancid salty flavor when I realized that something was terribly wrong. Rather than the nostalgic aroma of aged seasoning meat steaming up from the pot bringing back to me images of my mother and grandmothers working their Southern culinary magic in old time kitchens, I detected the distinct odor of Yankee ham. Name of God…I had inadvertently purchased Yankee ham hocks! It was too late to go back to the store so there was to be no lovely mess of greens to brighten up that dreary Sunday afternoon.

It goes without saying that the seasoning meat for greens must be just right. In the old days, we would simply go out to the meathouse and find the perfectly cured piece of fat back suspended from a rafter by a coat hanger wire. I remember the smell of the meathouse from my 1950s childhood. It was an unpretentious, unpainted little building the timbers of which were permeated with the aroma of curing slabs of seasoning meat yellowed with age and covered thickly with coarse salt. I recall beautiful hams, from beloved hogs butchered out of necessity, curing for a year in anticipation of some Thanksgiving or Christmas feast. And in the spring, my grandmother Blanche Irene would take a ham out of the meathouse , scrub off the mold, boil it up and produce a memorable Easter dinner. She just had a way as all experienced Southern cooks did and do.

The proper preparation of food is not a small matter to Southern women. We take pride in it, and in turn we are respected for our epicurean arts. Domestic cooking in the South is not dismissed as inconsequential as it is north of the border. There are male members of my own family who will not willingly eat potato salad other than mine and who speak with hushed and reverent tones on the subject. The prospect of eating Yankee potato salad …with hard little cubes of tater, tasteless and swimming in something yellow and sweet…is not anything proper Southern folks wish to think on for long.

But it becomes more and more difficult as St. Mary’s is increasingly deracinated to find the proper ingredients for Southern cooking…the white cornmeal, country style seasoning meats, lard. Thank goodness they are at least still available from that large quasi-Southern supermarket chain in The County or from a few locally, independently owned grocery stores…especially the small ones that buy their meats from Richmond wholesale distributors.

Anyway, I have learned well my lesson: I must be more careful next time and must remember not to shop at large Northern grocery chains, because, as God is my witness, I will never buy Yankee ham hocks again.

Gen. Pierre Gustauve Toutant Beauregard,

…Maryland contributed more regiments to the Southern armies than Florida? (Source: Maryland’s Confederate Heritage Webpage)

…Maryland was occupied by as many as 130,000 Yankee soldiers? I wonder how many of these occupiers were passed off by the invaders as Maryland "home guard" troops?

Southern Letters and Language

Did You Know…

… Maryland is the setting for the novel, Aid-De-Camp, written by James Dabney McCabe, Jr. during the War Between the States? Dedicating the book to Pierre Gustauve Toutant Beauregard, the Louisiana Cavalier who served the South so well, the author’s treatment of Baltimore in the early days of the conflict clearly demonstrates that Southerners like McCabe, who was a Virginian, assumed that Marylanders were cut from the same cloth as they and were of a Southern temperament. McCabe thought the women of Baltimore were beautiful and the men chivalrous. Please note, in the excerpt from his novel below, McCabe’s description of the voices of the nouveau arriviste Northerners—"keen, shrewd Yankee sharper(s)"— and Westerners in Maryland’s old port city. Note also his darkly humorous reference to Lincoln.

"This evening, the fourth of March, 1861, the streets were more crowded than usual. A dense throng poured through Howard and Liberty streets, into the great highway, Baltimore street, and mingling with the groups already there, filled it to its utmost capacity. The crowd which came in from the Washington Depot, was exceedingly merry, and loud and repeated shouts rose upon the air. There could be heard the shrill nasal twanged voice of the Yankee, and the coarse rough slang of the Western man. Around the Camden street Depot all was bustle and confusion. The large building was black with people, and the long trains, which were constantly arriving from Washington, discharged their passengers and swelled the crowd.

"It had been a gala day in Washington, and those people were returning from witnessing the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States. Fanaticism and sectional hate had succeeded in forcing an uncouth barbarian into the chair of Washington,and the greatest Republic upon which the sun ever shone, was tottering to its fall."

McCabe mentions St. Mary’s County in the novel. It is available online through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Aid-De-Camp is one more literary artifact that documents Maryland’s Southern past and has significance far beyond its intrinsic artistic merits.

Did You Know…

… the beautiful Southern language spoken by the last few true Marylanders is several centuries old, even older? Chaucer spoke it himself.

Fiddle Dee Dee, Yankee Ham Hocks!

One rainy Sunday I decided to make a mess of collard greens. A mess is defined as "right much" or "right smart, " but, for the carpetbaggers surreptitiously reading this unrepentant rebel’s commentary, in Yankee terms that would be 1.9 kilograms at STP… unless it’s a humid summer day and , by Yimminy, youse goizes AC ain’t working, in which case, add .5 grams of greens to make you a mess.

But I digress. Real Southern women, who, by the way, can cook up a storm on the hottest day of the year without benefit of air conditioning, know instinctively how to make good greens with a nice piece of seasoning meat…fat back, streak of lean, ham hock. There is nothing as delicious as an old time country boiled supper with cornbread or biscuits, cucumbers and vinegar, sweet tea, banana pudding.

And there is something especially homey and comforting about putting on a mess of greens and listening to the rain fall rat a tat tat on the tin roof above. At times like these, a feeling of well-being infuses the Southern cook, who, toting a child on one hip, with her free hand expertly prepares a rib-sticking old country favorite for her family.

But, on the particular rainy Sunday in question, serenaded via cassette tape by Claude Debussy, international stylist composer of note if a frog, I had just set the ham hocks to boiling for a few minutes to extract the delightfully down home rancid salty flavor when I realized that something was terribly wrong. Rather than the nostalgic aroma of aged seasoning meat steaming up from the pot bringing back to me images of my mother and grandmothers working their Southern culinary magic in old time kitchens, I detected the distinct odor of Yankee ham. Name of God…I had inadvertently purchased Yankee ham hocks! It was too late to go back to the store so there was to be no lovely mess of greens to brighten up that dreary Sunday afternoon.

It goes without saying that the seasoning meat for greens must be just right. In the old days, we would simply go out to the meathouse and find the perfectly cured piece of fat back suspended from a rafter by a coat hanger wire. I remember the smell of the meathouse from my 1950s childhood. It was an unpretentious, unpainted little building the timbers of which were permeated with the aroma of curing slabs of seasoning meat yellowed with age and covered thickly with coarse salt. I recall beautiful hams, from beloved hogs butchered out of necessity, curing for a year in anticipation of some Thanksgiving or Christmas feast. And in the spring, my grandmother Blanche Irene would take a ham out of the meathouse , scrub off the mold, boil it up and produce a memorable Easter dinner. She just had a way as all experienced Southern cooks did and do.

The proper preparation of food is not a small matter to Southern women. We take pride in it, and in turn we are respected for our epicurean arts. Domestic cooking in the South is not dismissed as inconsequential as it is north of the border. There are male members of my own family who will not willingly eat potato salad other than mine and who speak with hushed and reverent tones on the subject. The prospect of eating Yankee potato salad …with hard little cubes of tater, tasteless and swimming in something yellow and sweet…is not anything proper Southern folks wish to think on for long.

But it becomes more and more difficult as St. Mary’s is increasingly deracinated to find the proper ingredients for Southern cooking…the white cornmeal, country style seasoning meats, lard. Thank goodness they are at least still available from that large quasi-Southern supermarket chain in The County or from a few locally, independently owned grocery stores…especially the small ones that buy their meats from Richmond wholesale distributors.

Anyway, I have learned well my lesson: I must be more careful next time and must remember not to shop at large Northern grocery chains, because, as God is my witness, I will never buy Yankee ham hocks again.

A few weeks back, I ran into a transplanted Georgian wearing a Maryland CSA uniform which he had borrowed to wear to a Confederate event. He was not a re-enactor but simply wanted to show respect for the proceedings.

But the Georgian, it turns out, in spite of his show of Southern patriotism, was sadly unread on the subject of the War, the South and Maryland. I must remind myself from time to time that the general population, North and South, know virtually nothing about what happened in the spring of 1861. What they do know amounts to bits and pieces of the lies they learned in public schools and on the television. On the other hand, they are experts at what transpired on the latest reality show last night.

When confronted with something that runs counter to or is incompatible with their vague, erroneous notions about Maryland and the War, most people , like the Georgian, instead of opening their minds to new facts, through some sort of tortured logic, dismiss what they see as an aberration: a Marylander fighting for the South is some sort of historical freak. The Georgian informed me that while she might have sent some men to fight for the South, Maryland wasn’t… and isn’t… "as Southern" as Georgia.

But even people who are well educated will revert to deeply held prejudices. I wish I had a nickel for every time some one from below the Mason and Dixon, well acquainted with my stand on Maryland history and heritage, will say to me, "In the South we do this or that…we have country ham, we honor our ancestors…" as if I am a Yankee and wouldn’t know any of this. The irony is that I have to politely listen because I am also from the South where courtesy counts.

And these same Southerners who should know better will hold Marylanders accountable for what the Yankees have done to our state unaware that the same thing is happening to theirs. Each time I visit the Carolinas, I witness more and more rudeness. I hear more and more Northern accents. But I am smart enough to blame the rudeness and abominable Yankee brogues on carpetbaggers not the local people.

A beautifully read Southern partisan whom I respect and revere offered to me his opinion that because Yankees and their culture and values are making inroads in Maryland and Virginia, the Mason and Dixon Line is moving farther South all the time. He places it at just about Richmond at present. If that logic is followed, then the MDL will soon be located just below the Florida Keys. If that logic is followed, Washington, Lee and Jackson were Northerners.

But Yankee infestations aside, isn’t the South, first and foremost, a place just as Ireland is a place? The Norman British have striven for centuries to wipe out the culture, language and customs of that country but does that mean there is no Ireland? Ireland the place transcends what has been done to it. Ireland the place will always have a connection to its past no matter what the Brits and global pop culture do to it. The same is true of the South; the same is true of Maryland, in Jefferson Davis’s words, the "outpost of the South…first to be approached by Northern invasion."

But logical analysis is lost on most people and squishy sophistries prevail. Even the Southerners who grudgingly admit that Marylanders played a role in defending the South, really down deep think we are Northerners. No one it seems looks at maps these days or understands them perhaps if they do look at them.

But why does all this matter? There are people reading this column who are wondering

why anyone would care about such apparent cultural hair splitting. Simply put, it matters because people need to be connected to a place; even if they travel the world over, they need to identify with something permanent. We derive a sense of self-worth, and life has more meaning when we are connected to something substantial. It provides our frame of reference as we go forth into the world. But when people lose this frame of reference, lose who they are, they become nothing. They become Andrew Lytle’s pale creatures who once were men.

Our salvation lies in reclaiming our heritage and being true to ourselves. We must not allow outsiders to reduce the South to trailer parks and weird religious sects; it is a great civilization that once flourished and produced writers, artists, theologians, philosophers, statesmen. It was a great civilization that did not despise its elderly, did not murder its children in the womb.

If every Yankee in New Jersey and Ohio moves here, no one can take our past from us; no one can keep us from observing our customs and traditions. Maryland was the first Confederate state to fall and will always be a part of the South along with Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky ( and some would argue Delaware). The South is not an ideal; it is a place, like ancient Greece, and like Greece, it will live down through the ages even as it is reduced to silent, beautiful ruins.

Samuel Mudd was a brilliant, worldly man, with strong ideas about theology, government, culture and the War. He was not, as many would have us believe, the unremarkable old country doctor blown hither and yon by any political wind that blew. But the real Samuel Mudd has been replaced with a bloodless, convictionless and terribly neutral creature fabricated by the re-writers of the South’s —and Maryland’s—history and by posturing Mudd descendants ashamed of their Southern heritage.

Fortunately, we have Mudd’s own words to counter the lies told about him. From his prison in the Dry Tortugas in the Florida Keys, in letters written to his wife and family members, he clearly expressed his political philosophy, his thoughts on the innate differences between Southerners and Yankees and his ideas on why Southerners fought so resolutely against the Yankees, against impossible odds. Mudd’s words are as meaningful today as they were when he wrote them over 140 years ago.

Mudd often gave voice to his hopes that the Constitution and Constitutional precepts would someday be restored to America. He wrote in August of 1867, "The New York Herald, so bitter before in its demunications of everything Southern or Democratic, has now turned around and advocates their principles... By straws we know the direction of the wind, and we can conclude from these incidents the allaying of strife, the sober return to reason and justice."

But Mudd’s hopes were unfounded because the North’s victory was to set into motion malevolent forces that had and still have a profound effect on Americans. The excesses and abuses, the courting of the mob and the wants of the mob that characterized the Lincoln-Stanton dictatorship were seen by Mudd and other Southern thinkers..and even some smart Yankees... as fleeting and aberrant. But a century and a half later, these malignancies have become the norm. Now in the "Land of the Free," loss of liberty and big government intrusions hardly cause a stir, and most people believe Social Security checks and Medicare (socialist programs we have bartered our freedoms for) are God-given rights.

One of the hallmarks of our failing republic is a rabid and hollow egalitarianism, a phenomenon which is directly attributable to the North’s victory in 1865. John C. Calhoun, writing sixty years before the War, warned that rule by a numerical majority of the people in aggregate (pure democracy) would lead ultimately to what Jefferson most feared, the tyranny of the mob. Echoing the great Southern statesman, Samuel Mudd wrote in 1867, "Our country seems now not to be governed by the Constitution, or by law, but by unbridled popular or public opinion, of which I have no doubt many others, as in my case, have been made victims."

Before the War America was governed by a concurrent majority of the sovereign states in order to protect minority interests. The term, "minority interests," does not refer to the politics of race, but rather to the idea that the people in a particular state might have different interests from the people of another state or other states. If the nation is governed by a simple, numerical majority of all the people who vote in the country, this ignores these divergent interests and makes some Americans slaves to the whims of those living in highly populated areas of the country. The people in Virginia today, for example, without the power to veto certain actions or proposed actions of other states as would be accorded them under the old ante-bellum union, now have to bend to the will of the people in New York and California simply because these states are densely populated. Under the old pre-War Between the States compact model of the union, a union not ruled by the runaway egalitarianism of the 14th amendment, Virginia could make laws concerning abortion and the U.S. Supreme Court could not intervene to protect the individual Virginian’s "right" to do as she pleased.

Calhoun predicted (accurately) that under a nationalist model of the union, rule by the people in aggregate would prevail and that power would be shared by two corrupt not so different political parties catering to special interests in an America broken down into warring factions at each others’ throats and vying for political favors.

All of this has come to pass: D.C. politicians rule by polls; activist liberal judges rule from the bench empowered by the illegal 14th amendment which trumps the power of the individual states and grants to each person "equal protection"...that is grants extra-constitutional privileges to individuals belonging to certain highly favored victim groups: women, Hispanics, African Americans, Gays. The two main parties take turns dancing to the tune of a fickle capricious public. Even a "conservative" leader like George Bush, who is essentially a decent man, nevertheless governs by polls as did his forerunner Andrew Johnson about whom Mudd wrote, "The President does not feel warranted in the execution of his plainest duties under the Constitution without first consulting the mob spirit." America’s last hedge against total tyranny is its electoral college which is, by the grace of God and in spite of the efforts of Al Gore, still intact. This is all that keeps us from complete and utter subjugation of the big city socialists and illegal immigrants in the Northeast and on the Left Coast.

In a letter to his wife dated January 1, 1868, a year before his presidential pardon was signed by Johnson, Mudd penned the following:

"...you ask me to write something cheering? Nothing would afford me more pleasure than to be able to comfort & console you in your present unhappy & helpless condition. So long as the Government is controled (sic) by men without souls & less honesty I can not promise you nor myself anything. The Spirit of infidelity pervades the whole Country. This is not only in regard to God, but to the laws & the Constitution of the Country. They (Northerners) are materialists & think only of self-gratification—exulting in the ruin and misery they cause others."

If anyone doubt that soul-less materialists rule America today, he is either a fool or a soul-less materialist.

Source: The Life of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd by Nettie Mudd

Although carpetbaggers tell us that we (real St. Mary’s Countians) are ignorant and inconsequential and that St. Mary’s County is "nowhere," they exhibit an ironic and puzzling proprietorship towards our ancient customs and history. Begging questions, overextending middle clauses, spouting sophistries, from dizzying heights they hold forth on who we are and what happened in our past.

Here is a perfect example of the presumption of the carpetbagger A short while back, no less a personage than a low level Navy official at Pax River took it upon himself to set the record straight on St. Mary’s County’s (and Southern Maryland’s) sentiments towards the War Between the States. In a "Things to See and Do in St. Mary’s County" handout included in a Welcome Aboard Packet distributed by Patuxent River Naval Station to new personnel and their families, under the heading of Pt. Lookout, it says "…More than 4,000 of the estimated 52,000 Confederate prisoners of war held here had died of disease, bad sanitation and lack of decent food, water and shelter. The dead Confederate soldiers are honored by a towering obelisk which stands over their mass grave. This monument is the only one in the United State dedicated to an enemy." A member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy complained about this misleading paragraph to the staff at Billeting and to a Navy lieutenant named Craig Buist. He told her that no one else had complained and that Southern Marylanders and St. Mary’s Countians did indeed consider the Southern soldiers buried at Point Lookout enemies.

To enlighten Lt. Buist, 8,000 to 14,000 men—many of them Marylanders— died at Point Lookout because the occupation Yankee troops were too cruel to take care of them properly. St. Mary’s County was pro-secession and was called South Carolina in Embryo and Little Dixie. Maryland stayed in the union because while she was waiting for her sister state Virginia to act, she was invaded and occupied by Yankees; her state legislators were arrested, preventing a vote on a sovereign convention, the final step before secession. Still, thousands of Marylanders fought for the South. These are the hard, cold facts, not revisionist suppositions.

Lt. Buist, who presumed to speak for True Marylanders, is ill-advised to offer opinions about that which he knows apparently very little.

The Navy has deracinated us, has destroyed our culture; please don’t let it lie about our heritage. Here are some names and addresses and phone numbers I hope will be of interest to my readers.

I wish to thank as always Patricia Buck of the Point Lookout POW Descendants Organization for her kind assistance in the preparation of this commentary. I also wish to thank Sharon Stein. For the Cause Of the South.

In the spring of 1861 Abraham Lincoln ordered the invasion of the Old Line State. What took place in Maryland in the early days of the so called Civil War is central to the whole conflict: If historians and scholars fail to understand Lincoln’s policy towards this small Southern state, then they fail to understand the war itself; they fail to understand the great national tragedy that began with the spilling of blood on the streets of Baltimore that distant April day. Much is made of Fort Sumpter, where no lives were lost,
but little of Baltimore. Only a handful of unreconstructed Southerners and the occasional honest Yankee know what really happened in Maryland 140 years ago, and how the crushing of one tiny, sovereign state forever changed the political landscape in America.

For such an "unremarkable" place, as a Weekly Standard writer once labeled Maryland, it seems that everyone but everyone wishes to re-write her history. By lying about
Maryland’s political temperament before the war and about the invasion and occupation of the state by Union forces, revisionists don’t have to confront the truth about Lincoln nor the irreparable harm he did to our nation.

Lincoln bequeathed to America a federal government that has grown too large and too powerful and a judicial system that does everything but serve justice. Today the courts have become merely a tool of tyrants, the Constitution a meaningless document thanks to Honest Abe and his minions.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney (pronounced Tawny) was one of many Marylanders who stood up to Lincoln and his outrages. Taney, like Sir Thomas More who would have given the Devil himself benefit of law, defended unionist, secessionist, slaveholder and abolitionist alike from a fast and loose
interpretation of the Constitution. While denouncing slavery from the bench and having freed his own slaves years before the war, Taney is most famous for delivering the majority opinion in the Dred Scott vs. Sandford case of 1857,a ruling which many believe, led directly to the War Between the States. In 1861
the pro-union Chief Justice challenged Lincoln’s constitutional abuses. The arrogant dismissal by Lincoln’s agents of the writs of habeas corpus and attachment issued by Taney in the John Merryman trial in May of that year, however, left Taney with no recourse but to ask in vain that Lincoln render to Maryland that which was her birthright.

Revisionists like neoconservative Sean Hannity view Taney as an evil man who defended slavery. They haven’t brains enough to understand that he was strictly interpreting the Constitution whether he agreed with it or not. He wasn’t defending slavery; he considered slavery evil.

In the aftermath of the WBTS, the military junta in DC, employing any means necessary, pushed through the 13th and 14th amendments. It is the latter that has put our liberties in jeopardy.

Ironically it was the basis for the Supreme Court ruling that put George Bush into office. However pleasing the ramifications of the high court’s decision might have been to
conservatives...Bush is not a real conservative, but he was a far better man than was his ego maniacal opponent..the Supreme Court should have stayed out of the Florida election and have allowed the duly elected state legislature to rein in its criminal and out of control state supreme court.

But the US Supreme Court’s ruling was not insupportable. They held that Gore could not pick and choose which votes he wished recounted; he had to submit to a total recount or no recount. By ruling this way, the court in effect gave the election to Bush because there was not sufficient time to do a total recount.

The court strictly interpreted the odious 14th amendment.

Gore, desiring to change election laws in the middle of an election, ignoring the Constitution and rule by concurrent majority, attempted a coup d’etat, but was foiled by an amendment that usually works for liberals. The 14th, which was illegally "passed" in the dark days following Mr. Lincoln’s war, is the basis for all sorts of liberal misdeeds. The equal protection clause of the amendment takes power away from the states and gives it to the federal government. The founding fathers’ intended that the states be protected
from the federal government. Now the federal government in the name of "equal protection" for each individual has robbed states of most of their power.

States should have the right to decide matters such as gun control and abortion for themselves, but the omnipotent central government in DC rules with an iron hand and imposes its will in the name of "individual rights."

Liberal federal judges are ruling from the bench, while spineless Republicans allow the Democrats in Congress to stall Bush’s conservative or relatively conservative judicial appointments. One hundred forty years ago, a backwoods dictator said, "Do things our way, or we will send an army and force your
compliance at the point of a bayonet." After the conclusion of the war and the concomitant passage of the 14th amendment by an illegitimate process and by an illegitimate government, the statist dictators running our country say, "You will do things our way or we will force compliance with federal court rulings." And when even the 14th amendment becomes problematic in the consolidation of political power in Washington, it like any and all other amendments will be deliberately misapplied or ignored altogether. There is no rhyme or reason to tyranny. We now have the despot sophist’s dream come true: a federal judiciary ruling without any serious reference to the actual meaning of the law of the land.

Next Time: A Gentleman Farmer

Pride of Maryland:

CSS Virginia Commander

No one should be surprised that there seem to be so many Confederate naval heroes from Maryland.

It is only logical that men born and bred in a place hemmed in by some of the world’s most beautiful waterways and deep harbors would be natural-born sailors.

Still, this researcher is always happy to discover one more Maryland mariner who served the South on the high seas.

But what is particularly important about this naval figure, however, is that his actions at the outset of the War Between the States perfectly illustrate why the war was fought in the first place.

Franklin Buchanan, born in Baltimore in 1800, convinced that Maryland was going to secede, resigned his commission from the United States Navy.

He did this because he would not take up arms against his home state in the same way that Robert E. Lee refused to take up arms against Virginia when she seceded.

Had Virginia remained in the Union, Lee would have remained in the U.S. Army. And so…when the unthinkable happened…when Lincoln’s armies invaded the sovereign State of Maryland, altering the course of history and destroying the American Republic, Buchanan, once again not able to bring himself to go to war with his Maryland, attempted unsuccessfully to have his commission re-instated by the Union officials.

So loyal was he to his home state that this loyalty was his single motivation in choosing sides in the war.

It is precisely this allegiance to the individual state that defined the antebellum union, not allegiance to some nationalist government in Washington, D.C.

Buchanan was a reluctant Confederate only in the sense that he felt that he was fighting against Maryland.

In reality, he was fighting against the occupiers of his state.

It was the South’s good fortune that he, like thousands of other Marylanders, threw in his lot with the Confederacy.

Buchanan distinguished himself in those early days of the WBTS and, in August of 1862, was promoted to admiral, the highest ranking officer of the Confederate Navy.

Many years later even the U. S. Navy saw fit to honor him by naming a World War II destroyer after him.

In February of 1862, Flag Officer Buchanan on board the refurbished Virginia, formerly the frigate USS Merrimack commissioned by the U.S. Navy in 1856, set out to undermine the Union blockade that would eventually strangle the South.

On her first run, the Virginia, under Buchanan’s command, sunk two Yankee ships, the Cumberland and the Congress, in the Hampton Roads area.

A third Union ship, the Minnesota, managed to survive the Virginia’s fire. Buchanan was wounded in the battles and was hospitalized.

Under the command of a Lt. Jones, the Virginia continued to fight, exchanging broadsides with the Yankee ironclad the Monitor in March of 1862.

Later that spring, under J. Tattnall, the Virginia attempted to protect the James River from Union naval forces but was unsuccessful.

The ironclad foundered in the James and was run a ground, then destroyed by her crew.

Every school child in Maryland should know these basic facts about the battles of the Virginia and Buchanan’s skill as her first commander, but they do not learn real Maryland history in our schools anymore nor for that matter real U.S. history.

Remembering

These

Robertson’s final resting place near Bel Alton, Maryland, haunt of fugitive John Wilkes Booth and hotbed of Southern intrigue during the war, was discovered last spring by Wallace Bowling Camp Commander, Jim Dunbar. While driving down a country road, Mr. Dunbar noticed headstones on a rise of land in the middle of corn fields. With the permission of the owner of the farm, he subsequently returned, with his wife, Connie, and SCV friends, to clear away weeds and to set to rights an ancient cemetery containing five marked graves including Robertson’s and that of Samuel Hanson, father of John Hanson, American president under the Articles of Confederation. There are those who believe that the latter himself is buried in one of the unmarked graves also found in the cemetery.

At Robertson’s cross dedication, SCV re-enactor infantrymen fired a salute, and a bagpipe played Scotland the Brave and Maryland My Maryland, a hymn to secession and an embarrassment to Annapolis politicians anxious to replace it with a "less Southern" state song. At the edge of the cemetery knoll, old tobacco barns in the distance, SCV artillerists in gray and Confederate red fired a cannon that shook the ground with its report reminding spectators of the exigencies of war and the courage required to quick step into enemy shot and shell.

In honoring the bravery of men such as Captain Robertson, the SCV hopes to counter popular misconceptions about Maryland and the "Civil War" and to challenge the question-begging of revisionist-historians who reduce the state’s epic role during the conflict to a dull fiction portraying Maryland as a willing union state. Southern heritage groups contend that to misunderstand what happened in Maryland during the war — its invasion and occupation by Northern troops and its reconstruction— is to misunderstand the war in its entirety. Shifting demographics and the leveling influences of public education and mass media have produced a hybrid Marylander, an urbiculturalist, Northern not Southern, who finds the revised history palatable and any evidence of the state’s Secessionist sentiments 140 years ago incongruent, even unsettling.

But Maryland’s SCV camps are tireless in their efforts to tell the truth about the war and to call attention to the long list of Marylanders who supported the Southern cause and shaped the nation’s destiny, people like Henry Kyd Douglas, Bradley T. Johnson, Col. Richard "The French Lady" Thomas, the tragic Mary Surratt, Samuel Mudd, the CSS Alabama’s Raphael Semmes, Rebel Rose (Rose O’Neal Greenhow)… and the many Marylanders wrapped in Confederate battle flags who lie silent in forgotten graves.

Very special thanks go to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, in particular, Jim Dunbar, Bob Marks, Ray Mishoe (and family) for their kind assistance in preparing this commentary. And I also wish to acknowledge the gracious help given by Rose Marks.

The first and only president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, a flawed Southern hero it could be said, published his memoirs in 1881. Born in Kentucky (as was his nemesis Abraham Lincoln) and once married to a woman with Maryland roots (his first wife), Davis has been criticized for not listening to generals in the field when he should have listened and for other shortcomings. A more lackluster historical figure than Lee and Jackson, Davis nevertheless possessed a towering intellect and commanded respect even if grudging at times. His two -volume work entitled the Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government is a first hand report on the events of the War Between the States. His prose, unlike the flowery, melodramatic stuff of some Victorian writers of memoirs, is clear and unsentimental.

For students of Maryland history, Davis writes at length about the invasion and occupation of the Old Line State by Yankee troops. Davis has much to say about Maryland’s spineless Governor Hicks who was neither a Union man nor a secessionist but an oily opportunist who watched which way the wind blew before he acted or spoke.

In Volume 1, Chapter 5 of his memoirs, Davis talks about Maryland’s attempt to broker peace in the early months of the secession crisis:

But Hicks seemed in these early days to feel no allegiance to the North:

Indeed Hicks might have been mistaken for a Rebel firebrand. Davis writes:

This Governor Hicks was saying that Maryland and her sister Border States would secede if the Yankees didn’t end their attempts to oppress the Southern people through the levying of exorbitant tariffs and other unconstitutional actions. This Governor Hicks vowed "to make common cause" with other states to resist tyranny, in other words, to secede from the Union if the Yankees did not capitulate to demands for a return to Constitutional government.

But when the Yankees stopped a vote on secession by the Maryland legislature in Frederick, Maryland in 1861, Hicks changed his tune. Davis writes:

After the Yankees arrested the state legislators, the chameleon Hicks conveniently changed his southern sympathies to Unionist sympathies. It was no longer to his advantage to cast his lot with the South, to stand up for his besieged little Maryland. Instead, on December 3, 1861 Hicks, referring to what he now perceived as misdeeds on the part of the Maryland legislators in the sessions held prior to the one the Yankees broke up, wrote, "this continued until the general government (Yankees) had ample reason to believe it (Maryland’s legislature) was about to go through the farce of enacting an ordinance of secession when the treason was summarily stopped by the dispersion of the traitors." Hicks stated, "the people have declared in the most emphatic tones which I have never doubted that Maryland has no sympathy with the rebellion and desires to do her fullshare in the duty of suppressing it." This suppliant and compliant Hicks is a far cry from the earlier almost heroic Hicks who was ready to secede rather than live in chains. Concerning the governor’s metamorphosis into a Yankee lover, Davis writes : " It would be more easy than gracious to point out the inconsistency between his first statements and this his last. The conclusion is inevitable that he kept himself in equipoise and fell at last as men without conviction usually do upon the stronger side."

Hicks could have been a Southern hero rather than the almost forgotten figure he became. Maryland was of great importance to the North. That is why the Yankees moved quickly to conquer the state. Hicks might have thwarted their invasion had he been a real leader —as he initially appeared to be —and would have secured for himself a measure of immortality.

Gettysburg:

Forward With

Down with the Eagle Up with the Cross

A few Saturdays ago I visited Gettysburg. The day was cold and sunny, and I was thankful for that. On a dreary rainy weekend many years earlier, I had visited the famous battlefield and had found it oppressive. It is a mournful place I think for Southerners because Gettysburg, it could be said, was the beginning of the end for the South (although, it is argued, that any chance the Confederacy had for victory died at Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863 with the mortal wounding of Lee’s most famous "lieutenant," Stonewall Jackson). A neophyte in the field of historical research and not entirely comprehending the magnitude of the sacrifice made to the Southern cause at Gettysburg, when I crossed back over the Mason and Dixon Line after that first visit , I took with me only general impressions of sadness and loss.

My visit was far more meaningful this time because I have since been blessed with a deeper understanding of the battle. And, this time, it was my privilege to be part of a group treated to a special walking tour of Pickett’s Charge, the turning point in the three days of fighting at Gettysburg . But more importantly, the tour was conducted by a licensed battlefield guide who is quite likely the most knowledgeable man alive with respect to George Pickett and his celebrated charge. Wayne Motts is passionate about his subject but offers no "Northern" perspective, no "Southern" perspective, no question begging nonsense about the war having been fought primarily over slavery or Southerners having been benighted inbreds who wanted to overthrow the government. He simply relates the truth about what happened at one battle.

The trip was sponsored by the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to which I now belong. The day was not only pleasant, the company wonderful; the tour cleared up many misconceptions that I had rattling around in my brain about Pickett, about his charge.

As interesting an historical figure as Pickett was, contrary to what I had supposed prior to my trip up North that Saturday, he did have help. Wayne Motts was a wellspring of information on those Confederate commanders who distinguished themselves at Gettysburg, among them Marylander Issac Ridgeway Trimble, veteran of the Battle of Baltimore (after the first wave of Yankees invaded the city in April of 1861, Trimble, carrying out the orders of Governor Hicks, burned railroad bridges to keep Northern troops from entering the state of Maryland). Trimble was to survive "Pickett’s" Charge and the War and was to return to Baltimore after the conflict.

Before the tour I had envisioned a long line of haggard and hungry Confederates mowed down by withering Yankee fire as they courageously crossed miles of flat open field. They were, in fact, slaughtered by the Yankees, but the most dramatic moment of the charge happened at the very end of it. Most of the time, the
Confederates wisely used the hilly terrain and woods to conceal themselves from the Yanks. The Southern boys in that last few yards, however, quick stepped into hell, marched to almost certain death through a wall of shot. They were so extraordinarily courageous the Yankees cheered the few who made it to the Northern line across Emmitsburg Road. It would be impossible for any true Southerner to walk those last few yards without dabbing at his eyes.

I came away from Gettysburg not repressed and depressed this time but resolved to stop complaining about any small sacrifices I might make for the cause of freedom and to keep on fighting even against impossible odds. A trip up North does the soul good once in a while.

Next Time: Jeff Davis on Maryland

While in some circles the question of his guilt or innocence in the Lincoln assassination goes unanswered, Dr. Samuel Mudd the man is not a mystery. Mudd was exceptionally intelligent, well educated, musically inclined, and, by his own admission, "naturally nervous and excitable." He was extremely devoted to his wife and children. He was a devout Catholic, a gentleman farmer, a Southern man.

Dr. Mudd’s letters written from his prison cell in the Florida Keys reveal his reactions to harsh prison conditions (although he does say in one letter that Fort Jefferson was kept relatively clean) as well as his attitudes towards Yankees, the War, Reconstruction, Race and the South. What is remarkable about his letters is that they tell us much about Mudd even though they were censored by his Yankee captors.

In spite of that censorship, Mudd’s letters clearly express his resentment towards the Yankees and what they did to his Southland, his Maryland. He was keenly aware of the consequences of the South’s defeat and understood the implications of that defeat: the loss of liberty and the rise of mob rule. His despication of the Northern mob is evident in the words written by him on June 2, 1866: "I feel that I have complied with every duty to God, to man and to the Government. My conscience rests easy under all the grossly false and frivolous charges, notwithstanding their approval by an unjust, bigoted, and partisan Court. I scorn the idea, the doctrine that the innocent should suffer to satisfy a bloodthirsty and vindictive people. ..They who contend that the multitude, the mob, must rule, though innocence and justice be trodden under foot, are walking exactly in the footsteps of poor weak old [Pontius] Pilate."

These are not the words of a "neutral" or "apolitical" man. These are the words of a defeated Southern patriot, a bitter and broken man who does not call the North his home. In a letter from prison dated September 5, 1865, Mudd again gives voice to his Southern identity. In the letter he complains about a lack of truthfulness on the part of "Northern newspapers." He states further, "I have lost all confidence in the veracity and honesty of the Northern people, and if I could honorably leave the country for a foreign land , I believe our (his family’s) condition would be bettered." These are the words not of a Northern patriot betrayed by his own people, but of a Southerner who had expected honor among a conquering people, a people very different from his own kind. Those who attempt to portray Mudd as a Yankee need only read his letters to learn who he really was.

Lawlessness in Occupied Reconstruction Era Maryland

As stated earlier, Mudd had access to newspapers while in prison, and he often comments on current events in his letters and expresses concern for the safety of his wife and children living in the midst of mayhem and murder in occupied Maryland in the aftermath of war and assassination. In a letter written to Mrs. Mudd on New Year’s Day 1866, he refers to "idle, roving, and lawless" men (known as "patrols" consisting of both black and white men) who threatened innocent citizens in Charles County (even in the late twentieth century some black people in Southern Maryland still recalled that as children they heard older family members talk of "pattyrollers" ). Mudd tells his wife to "be careful...and be ever guarded." In the same letter Mudd states, "The papers I notice are filled with horrible, most infamous and degraded crimes perpetrated by these outlaws. "

In a letter dated August 13, 1866 sent to his wife, Mudd again expresses his concern for her safety and roundly criticizes the Republicans, those whom he calls "the radical majority of Congress," those whom he obviously resents. He writes, " You spoke of the murder of Mr. Lyles, and the papers mention the robbery of Mr. Posey. Owing to their proximity to you, I have suffered some alarm, knowing your timid nature and unprotected and helpless condition. Such crimes, and far more brutal, are of daily occurrence, and when far away hardly excite our horrors; so soon does the mind become familiar by their daily narration in the press. I think it advisable for the citizens to take measures of precaution, by appointing suitable officers in every district to inquire into the condition and purpose of every suspicious party. These atrocities are only the fruit of the late unnatural strife, and we can only blame the fanatical majority of Congress for their long continuance. ..

To Be Continued

Correction: In my first installment of this series on Mudd, which appeared in this paper last week, I mistakenly wrote that David E. Herold had attempted the assassination of Lincoln’s Secretary of State Seward; the truth is that Lewis Payne was the would-be assassin. Payne went to the gallows for this act along with Herold for his participation in the assassination of Lincoln.

Nettie Mudd’s biography not only gives the reader insights into Dr. Mudd’s character but answers nagging questions about the assassination itself. Apparently the Mudds knew Booth fairly well before he shot Lincoln. Nettie quotes her mother, whom Samuel affectionately called Frank (for Frances), at length concerning controversial events that took place in the fall of 1864:

In a footnote that appears in the pages following the words quoted above, Nettie reiterates that Booth indeed stayed overnight at the Mudds in November of 1864. The horse purchased by Booth from the Mudds’ neighbor was eventually to be ridden by Herold the night he attempted to assassinate Secretary of State Seward.

Dr. Mudd’s counsel, General Thomas Ewing , was an eloquent speaker and did a creditable job of defending Mudd, but his statements to the military court that tried Mudd, statements that are quoted by Nettie, are at variance with Frances Mudd’s account of the events leading up to and following the assassination. Ewing told the military tribunal that there was no evidence "of Booth’s having stayed all night with the accused (Dr. Mudd) on the visit when the horse was bought of Gardiner (Mudd’s neighbor), or at any other time..." Ewing stated to the court that one Colonel Wells was told by Mudd that Booth spent the night at Mudd’s Charles County farmhouse in November 1864, but Ewing dismissed this testimony because it was in conflict with the testimony of John Thompson who said that Booth had stayed with a Mr. Queen not with Samuel Mudd.

General Ewing did not appear to have been privy to all the facts related to occasions on which Mudd had met with Booth prior to the assassination. He argued before the tribunal that Mudd only saw Booth in November of 1864 and never saw him again after that. After the trial, Dr. Mudd himself admitted that he saw Booth in November and again the next month in Washington, D.C. Mudd verified that he at one point had a "casual meeting with Booth in front of one of the hotels on Pennsylvania avenue, Washington, D.C. on the 23rd of December, 1864." During the trial, a man named Weichmann testified that he and John Surratt bumped into Booth and Mudd on Seventh Street in Washington not in December but one January night. Weichmann said that Mudd upon seeing Surratt called out Surratt’s name and that Surratt recognized Mudd "as an old acquaintance." Weichmann related that Booth invited everyone to his room at the National Hotel for wine and cigars and that Mudd and Booth had a private conversation lasting "ten to twenty minutes."

While Dr. Mudd in a statement from his prison cell at Fort Jefferson in Florida denied any such private conversation with Booth in a hotel room in December or January or at any time in Washington D.C. , Mudd, I think somewhat implausibly, did state that he accidentally bumped into Booth on Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. on December 23rd and that Booth asked Mudd to introduce him, Booth, to John Surratt who was living in the city at that time (something Dr. Mudd insisted he didn’t know until Booth informed him of the fact then and there). Booth had Surratt’s address, but Mudd was not inclined to oblige him with an introduction to Surratt. In a strange twist of fate, Booth and Mudd, after having met by accident, according to Dr. Mudd’s statement, proceeded to run into Surratt and Weichmann just moments later. Washington was a small Southern city in the 19th century, but it wasn’t that small.

That Mudd’s meetings with Booth and Surratt that December day in 1864, as a bloody war was nearing its end, were entirely accidental seems doubtful. What remains certain, however, is that Dr. Mudd is one of the most complicated, misunderstood and fascinating figures in American history.

To Be Continued

In 1966 I attended Towson State College near Baltimore. Because there was no room in the dormitories that fall, the fall the Orioles won the World Series, I lived off-campus with three other Towson students in an old three-story house on Evesham Avenue just inside the city limits. My year away from home was bittersweet. I was miserably homesick, broke all the time but still enjoyed my new city life (though I was to discover that my new life could be fraught with dangers). By the sixties, Baltimore was no longer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "rotted, polite" Southern port city...the old guard were nearly extinct. Still, I loved the gritty charm of the working class neighborhood where I had taken up residence.

I loved the bus rides to and from campus, but on a few bitter-cold mornings, I remember, a friend of one of my roommates would swing by Evesham Avenue in his VW Beetle and drive a couple of us to the college so we could eat a hearty breakfast at the cafeteria before early classes. His Bug had no heater, so we would shiver all the way along York Road to school. In spite of the chilly transportation, I especially enjoyed those mornings. A city in the hours before dawn is lovely and quiet... and more manageable for country girls. And I appreciated the deserted campus and the inviting lights of the cafeteria and happily anticipated its warmth and the aroma of coffee and frying bacon. Back then, this eldest daughter of a family of eight children loved the idea of not having to cook and having breakfast and other meals prepared for her. It was an unimagined luxury.

Now...in the afternoons, I always took the bus home to Evesham Avenue, to the house belonging to a Yankee named John Smith and his wife. The Smiths, essentially decent folks, rented rooms to college students. A beatnik and an artist—he painted abstract monstrosities—John Smith, in my adolescent mind, was the epitome of modernity and sophistication.

And one of my roommates was "sophisticated" as well...a city girl who spoke with what sounded like a Northern accent to me. It turned out she had old Maryland roots but was in fact a deracinated urbanized Marylander. My other roommates included a classmate from high school days (a nice person but not a real St. Mary’s Countian) and Barbara Jean who was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland...from Salisbury. Barbara Jean had a Southern accent so thick you could cut it with a knife.

This accent of hers was the subject of ridicule: the city girl and the abstract art- painting goateed beatnik landlord of ours had nothing but contempt for it. And since at the time I didn’t understand that the city girl’s and the beatnik’s prejudices were rooted in their own ignorance and lack of sophistication, I didn’t question their authority to judge what was and was not a correct way of speaking.

There was no doubt that Barbara Jean was a naive country girl. I was too, but I was a phony...I was trying to pretend otherwise. Looking back, neither of us was the cold cynical young modern woman of the 60s. But that guilessness that Barbara Jean and I had in common (in spite of my airs) proved to be dangerous.

One night around midnight, the quiet of the house on Evesham was disturbed by the ringing of the third floor doorbell (each floor’s doorbell had a distinctive sound). Awakened from a deep sleep on the second floor, I somnabulently stumbled down the stairs to answer the door. Without thinking in my drowsy state...no one lived on the third floor and that bell had no business ringing... I opened the door and standing there in front of me was a man. He was a large hulking fellow with a crew cut. He looked like a dock worker or a steel mill hand. I will never forget the question he asked me: "How many of you are there?" I still wasn’t aware of the danger I was in and answered, "Four." He replied, "Too many." Fully awake by this time, I had the presence of mind to close the door and to lock it.

My more savvy roommates ranted and raved about my foolhardy behavior. My face burning with embarrassment because I had appeared such a bumpkin, I was delighted to hear Barbara Jean speak up to say that a few days prior to the scary incident , at the drugstore on the corner of Evesham and York Road, she had struck up a conversation with a man who matched my description of our intruder. Barbara Jean wondered if she hadn’t volunteered too much information to this stranger in what seemed an innocent conversation to her. I joined the other roommates in lecturing her on being more wary of people. I wanted someone else to blame for putting my roommates and myself in harm’s way. Barbara Jean was a convenient scapegoat. I would have died of shame to have been considered just a country girl...but that is what I was. I wasn’t accustomed to psychopaths knocking on my door in the dead of night. I did not align myself with the down-home Southern-talking old-fashioned country girl Barbara Jean but chose to join those who belittled her and blamed her for the weird visitor who had rung the third floor bell.

As ashamed as I am now to admit it, back then I believed that urban and Northern people—and there were plenty of these in Baltimore at the time— were somehow superior to the Barbara Jeans. I acquired this notion from TV and movies and from the Yankee transplants with whom I had attended high school. They ridiculed the way we locals spoke, and they seemed so self-assured and jaded...which made them wordly I thought. And my own parents, trying their best to rid themselves of what others had convinced them was a "backward" way of speaking and desperately seeking the approval of the transients with whom they associated, had succeeded in making us their children self-conscious of our St. Mary’s County accents and our County ways. We children refrained from using certain pronunciations and colloquialisms and pretended a bored urbanity in order to be accepted by the "educated" and exotic new students in our midst.

It was with this misguided attitude that I took on the big city. Barbara Jean definitely wasn’t one of those "superior" types whom I was encouraged to admire. Before that first semester at Towson, I was too ignorant of my own state to know much about the Eastern Shore, the last bastion of Maryland’s Southern independence. Carpetbaggers and carpetbagger wannabees hate the Eastern Shore because it is still culturally Old Maryland. Socialist politicians and other tyrants hate Eastern Shore people because it is difficult to manipulate, to rule them. They are free, old -style Marylanders.

The Shore is still culturally intact...more or less. A few weeks ago I discovered a wonderful AM radio station over that way (54.0). Not only does it play old tunes...the standards of the 40s and 50s, country, pop, even some light rock.. it features hometown-produced radio commercials. It is a treat to hear the accents of the Eastern Shore. It is the way Barbara Jean spoke...only her drawl was even more pronounced as the Eastern Shore was more culturally pristine in the 1960s.

I wish I could go back in time and tell off that Yankeefied city girl and the beatnik who ridiculed Barbara Jean. I wish I could go back in time and appreciate the local people I snubbed in high school in my profound ignorance and my shame that I was local myself. If I could turn back the hands of time, I would have exulted in my native culture and would have turned my nose up at Yankees and their ways. I would have been Barbara Jean’s champion that night the man who looked like Richard Speck came calling. I would have explained that I opened the door because I was indeed an innocent in a treacherous urban world. I would have explained that Barbara Jean and I were cut from the same cloth: we were both, by the Grace of God, True Maryland Girls.

Judicial Tyranny:

Lincoln’s Legacy

In the spring of 1861 Abraham Lincoln ordered the invasion of the Old Line State. What took place in Maryland in the early days of the so called Civil War is central to the whole conflict: If historians and scholars fail to understand Lincoln’s policy towards this small Southern state, then they fail to understand the war itself; they fail to understand the great national tragedy that began with the spilling of blood on the streets of Baltimore that distant April day. Much is made of Fort Sumter, where no lives were lost,
but little of Baltimore. Only a handful of unreconstructed Southerners and the occasional honest Yankee know what really happened in Maryland 140 years ago, and how the crushing of one tiny, sovereign state forever changed the political landscape in America.

For such an "unremarkable" place, as a Weekly Standard writer once labeled Maryland, it seems that everyone but everyone wishes to re-write her history. By lying about

Maryland’s political temperament before the war and about the invasion and occupation of the state by Union forces, revisionists don’t have to confront the truth about Lincoln nor the irreparable harm he did to our nation.

Lincoln bequeathed to America a federal government that has grown too large and too powerful and a judicial system that does everything but serve justice. Today the courts have become merely a tool of tyrants, the Constitution a meaningless document thanks to Honest Abe and his minions.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney (pronounced Tawny) was one of many Marylanders who stood up to Lincoln and his outrages. Taney, like Sir Thomas More who would have given the Devil himself benefit of law, defended unionist, secessionist, slaveholder and
abolitionist alike from a fast and loose interpretation of the Constitution. While denouncing slavery from the bench and having freed his own slaves years before the war, Taney is most famous for delivering the majority opinion in the Dred Scott vs. Sandford case of 1857,a ruling which many believe, led directly to the War

Between the States. In 1861 the pro-union Chief Justice challenged Lincoln’s constitutional abuses. The arrogant dismissal by Lincoln’s agents of the writs of habeas corpus and attachment issued by Taney in the John Merryman trial in May of that year, however, left Taney with no recourse but to ask in vain
that Lincoln render to Maryland that which was her birthright.

Revisionists like neoconservative Sean Hannity view Taney as an evil man who defended slavery. They haven’t brains enough to understand that he was strictly interpreting the Constitution whether he agreed with it or not. He wasn’t defending slavery; he considered slavery evil.

In the aftermath of the WBTS, the military junta in DC, employing any means necessary, pushed through the 13th and 14th amendments. It is the latter that has put our liberties in jeopardy.

Ironically it was the basis for the Supreme Court ruling that put George Bush into office. However pleasing the ramifications of the high court’s decision might have been to
conservatives...Bush is not a real conservative, but he was a far better man than was his ego maniacal opponent..the Supreme Court should have stayed out of the Florida election and have allowed the duly elected state legislature to rein in its criminal and out of control state supreme court.

But the US Supreme Court’s ruling was not insupportable. They held that Gore could not pick and choose which votes he wished recounted; he had to submit to a total recount or no recount. By ruling this way, the court in effect gave the election to Bush because there was not sufficient time to do a total recount. The court strictly interpreted the odious 14th amendment. Gore, desiring to change election laws in the middle of an election, ignoring the Constitution and rule by concurrent majority, attempted a coup d’etat, but was foiled by an amendment that usually works forliberals. The 14th, which was illegally "passed" in the dark days following Mr. Lincoln’s war, is the basis
for all sorts of liberal misdeeds. The equal protection clause of the amendment takes power away from the states and gives it to the federal government. The founding fathers’ intended that the states be protected from the federal government. Now the federal government in the name of
"equal protection" for each individual has robbed states of most of their power.

States should have the right to decide matters such as gun control and abortion for themselves, but the omnipotent central government in DC rules with an iron hand and imposes its will in the name of "individual rights."

Liberal federal judges are ruling from the bench, while spineless Republicans allow the Democrats in Congress to stall Bush’s conservative or relatively conservative judicial appointments. One hundred forty years ago, a backwoods dictator said, "Do things our way, or we will send an army and force your compliance at the point of a bayonet." After the conclusion of the war and the concomitant passage of the 14th amendment by an illegitimate process and by an illegitimate government, the statist dictators running our country say, "You will do things our way or we will force compliance with federal court rulings." And when even the 14th amendment becomes problematic in the consolidation of political power in Washington, it like any and all other amendments will be deliberately misapplied or ignored altogether. There is no rhyme or reason to tyranny. We now have the despot sophist’s dream come true: a federal judiciary ruling without any serious reference to the actual meaning of the law of the land.

Next Time: A Gentleman Farmer

Parsing Politicians Sell America Down the River

As I have said many times in this column, those on the left are brilliant propagandists. They are not intelligent nor are they well educated, but they are crafty and sly. They have what Shakespeare called mother wit.

They have most of America believing that there is a Constitutional prohibition against offending certain ethnic or racial groups. More and more we hear that someone’s words—written or spoken— are "divisive." Even simple truth telling these days is often seen as hate mongering by the left. These charges of divisiveness carry with them the scary implication that somehow people must curb free speech if some are offended.

Those who would rob us of our basic liberties are taking aim at all forms of expression. Recently, on an AM radio station, I listened to two apparently liberal types discussing the newest Mel Gibson movie on the life and crucifixion of Christ. It is noteworthy that neither of the liberals had seen the film yet they had formed strong opinions about it. Calling the movie..you guessed it.. divisive and offensive to Jewish people, they questioned whether or not it should have been produced in the first place. The radio pundits did not say who should stop movie producers like Gibson from making films the pundits don’t like. Perhaps they were thinking of Government censorship...something which America is inexorably moving towards.

Two-bit totalitarians are defining the terms of the debate. They have most of us thinking that we have to choose our words carefully. Those of us who will not be cowed, who will not be silent are branded as crazy, dangerous or both. Students of history...the few of us that are left...will find these tactics for dealing with dissidents familiar. In the old Soviet Union, insane asylums were filled with dissenters.

The liberal elite...those among us who are just a little more equal than the rest... have divided us up into warring factions which they manipulate and pit against each other to stay in power. Free speech is nothing if not a huge impediment to them. In the not too distant future, it will be illegal to tell the truth if the truth is politically incorrect and to speak out against flawed liberal ideas such as affirmative action and unchecked immigration.

Soon we will not be permitted to say that America is under silent attack, that we are being overrun by immigrants... in particular Hispanics. Liberals who are surreptitiously reading this commentary will be horrified at what they consider my narrow-mindedness, my bigotry, my xenophobia. But I am not narrow-minded, bigoted nor xenophobic. I am not an ethnocentric. I find the cultures of the world fascinating and enjoy learning about them. I am proud to claim several people of Mexican descent as my blood kin.

Two of these kinsmen, cousins of mine, whose grandfather was assassinated while running for office in Mexico, are poised and beautifully educated. They were raised in Washington, D.C., Europe and South America and are the products of wealth and posh private schools. Yet, because they are "Hispanic," in today’s upside down America, they could, if they were of that mind set, call themselves disadvantaged and claim entitlement to special considerations in the work place and in other areas of life.

The term "Hispanic" is contrived. It lumps together people of many diverse cultures and paints them all as second class citizens of the world. But in reality, the old European Spanish culture is quite distinct from other Latin American cultures which in turn are each unique. The ruling liberal elite, for convenience, have pieced together a large useful victim group to which to pander to garner votes to stay in power. Hispanic newcomers legal and illegal are beginning to have an effect on our government. Gray Davis and his henchmen in the California legislature by granting illegals drivers’ licenses have in effect made it possible for these undocumented aliens to vote in the next presidential election. California carries a lot of weight in the union because of the large number of electoral votes the state has. But Gray Davis and his ilk would rather rule in a hellish Balkanized America than to serve in a nation of laws grounded in the Constitution and natural rights. Hopefully Davis’s days as governor of the Golden State are numbered.

Besides recalling self-serving incompetents from office, Americans should be asking themselves these questions: "How many more immigrants ...legal and illegal...should we allow to cross our borders and land on our shores...a million, two million, tens of millions, all the people in the world who wish to come here?"... "What percentage of our hard-earned wages should we give to the government to pay for services to the minions at our temple door.... 50%, 70%, 90%?"

Sometimes I consider leaving the United States because it is deteriorating so rapidly. I’ve heard that Switzerland for all its socialistic programs still, because of a
liberty-protecting constitution, allows its citizens to live in relative freedom. And of course, it is a lovely country.

But, on second thought, Switzerland wouldn’t have me... I am too old. They do not admit immigrants over a certain age. That nation, unlike America, protects its sovereignty and can control immigration as it chooses. Liberal politicians say nothing about the ageism of the Swiss.

Cooler heads need to prevail here in our country and must not allow scheming liberal politicians to define the argument. The fact that we are "a nation of immigrants" doesn’t mean America cannot protect her borders and enforce immigration laws. Cynical politicians tell us we need illegal immigrants to take jobs
that go unfilled. These same politicians decry the high unemployment rate.

They must not be allowed to define the debate with their illogical arguments and implied threats to free
speech. Americans can love the peoples of the world and protect our borders and way of life at the same time. Vaya con Dios.

Next Time: Back to History

Isaac Mayo:

Urban elitists who write the "news" and commentaries for liberal newspapers never cease to irritate me with their question begging. Question begging, for those of you unfamiliar with Aristotelian logic.. and that would be most people today, is the act of proceeding as if something is already a proven fact when its veracity has not been established. Question begging is a debating trick designed to confound unwitting, addle-brained polemical opponents...but I am not unwitting nor addle-brained and neither are my readers (excepting those Yankee liberal elitists surreptitiously reading The Rag and this column).

Young journalists and not so young journalists —who all seem to be liberal Yankees or deracinated Southerners... not much different from Yankees— presume that the cause of the South was benighted, evil. They cannot defend their presumption; they just feel —they are nothing if not touchy feelly —that the South was bad. But when asked to explain why the South was wrong, they babble sophomoric sound bites they’ve heard from Dan Rather and mouth the Marxist cant they’ve been spoon fed by left wing "educators." They know almost nothing about the War for Southern Independence, but this does not stop them from palming off their stale leftist cliches as savvy journalism.

In a piece that appeared in the Baltimore Sun on August 11th, Carl Schoettler barely conceals his happiness over the misguided attempts of the descendants of Marylander Isaac Mayo to "clear" the latter’s name. Implicit in Schoettler’s reporting on the matter is his conviction that service in the Confederate army was something shameful. Not at any point in Schoettler’s article, does he ever suggest that serving the South might be a noble endeavor for a military man nor demonstrate even the most juvenile grasp of the events that occurred across those five Aprils so long ago.

Schoettler writes: "Commodore Isaac Mayo served his country long and well, but his Civil War
stance cost him his rank and good name. Today, a descendant has won a battle to restore both. Schoettler calls Isaac Mayo’s resignation from the Union navy a "dark stain of dishonor" that had "marred the reputation of the brilliant but neglected Maryland ‘Naval Warrior...’

At the beginning of the War Between the States, Mayo who was in his sixties, resigned his commission. On May 18, 1861 his dismissal was ordered... presumably by Lincoln. But Mayo’s great-great-grandson Thomas Henry Gaither Bailliere Jr.,along with other family members, insists that Mayo died on May 10th and has spent almost thirty years trying to "vindicate" his great great grandfather’s name on a mere technicality. Bailliere for three decades has proclaimed that his ancestor was not a vile Confederate but a Union hero. And he is correct in some regards: Mayo, who was from Anne Arundel County, was a Naval hero who served the old American Republic well, but his last act in life was to throw his lot in with the South. He proudly repudiated the North and Lincoln’s administration. The fact that he died before he was discharged from the Yankee navy is of little consequence... or would be if history were not being re-written as it is.

Nevertheless, this summer, military officials have "corrected" Mayo’s record because he "died while on the rolls of the Navy." Schoettler’s delight is obvious when he gushes: "Mayo’s honor is finally restored. And so the tale ends well - after four generations." But Mayo’s honor was never lost; he resigned from the Union army when he realized that Lincoln was subverting Constitution liberties and destroying the American Republic... his resignation was a most honorable thing. Now 140 years after a Southern hero’s death, an unread, indoctrinated kinsman has attempted to slander his great great grandfather’s name with sly Yankee tricks and question begging. Mayo is turning in his grave. But God bless him...he once stood up to tyranny and lost everything. He will always be remembered as a Confederate hero by those who cherish freedom no matter how many questions liberal journalists and degenerate progeny beg.

My gratitude to all the good folks who called my attention to the Baltimore Sun article.

Next Time:

The Devil Went Down to Alabama

In September of 1863, Southern forces under Robert E. Lee crossed the Potomac into Maryland just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Battle of Sharpsburg (Yankees refer to it as Antietam) was one of the bloodiest campaigns in the War Between the States, and historians can’t agree which side won it. Lee technically retreated but inflicted such damage on the Yankee forces they were "disorganized" as a result. The Union troops numbered about 90,000, the Southern troops about 40,000. The Southerners were superior warriors always outnumbered but always effective. Just before the carnage, General Robert E. Lee wrote this message to the citizens of Maryland explaining his advance into the Old Line State:

"Headquarters Army N. Va. ,

Near Frederick Town, 8th September 1862

"TO THE PEOPLE OF MARYLAND

"It is right that you should know the purpose that has brought the army under my command within the limits of your State, so far as that purpose concerns yourselves.

"The People of the Confederate States have long watched with the deepest sympathy the wrongs and outrages that have been inflicted upon the citizens of a Commonwealth allied to the States of the South by the strongest social, political, and commercial ties.

"They have seen with profound indignation their sister-State deprived of every right and reduced to the condition of a conquered province.

"Under the pretence of supporting the Constitution, but in violation of its most valuable provisions, your citizens have been arrested and imprisoned upon no charge and contrary to all forms of law; the faithful and manly protest against this outrage made by the venerable and illustrious Marylander to whom in better days no citizen appealed for right in vain was treated with scorn and contempt; The government of your chief city has been usurped by armed strangers; your legislature has been dissolved by the unlawful arrest of its members; freedom of the press and of speech has been suppressed; words have been declared offences by an arbitrary decree of the Federal executive, and citizens ordered to be tried by a military commission for what they may dare to speak.

"Believing that the people of Maryland possessed a spirit too lofty to submit to such a government, the people of the South have long wished to aid you in throwing off this foreign yoke, to enable you again to enjoy the inalienable rights of freemen and restore independence and sovereignty to your State.

"In obedience to this wish our army has come among you, and is prepared to assist you with the power of its arms in regaining the rights of which you have been despoiled.

"This, citizens of Maryland, is our mission, so far as you are concerned.

"No constraint upon your free will is intended; no intimidation will be allowed.

"Within the limits of this army at least, Marylanders shall once more enjoy their ancient freedom of thought and speech.

"We know no enemies among you, and will protect all, of every opinion.

"It is for you to decide your destiny freely and without constraint.

"This army will respect your choice, whatever it may be; and, while the Southern people will rejoice to welcome you to your natural position among them, they will only welcome you when you come of your own free will.

"R.E. Lee
General commanding"

General A.L. Long, Lee’s aid, writes in Memoirs of Robert E. Lee that the foregoing was received by the people of Maryland "coldly." Long states that "The Marylanders as a people sympathized with the Confederates, but stood aloof because they did not wish to see their State become the theatre of war." But in the very next line in his book, Long says that Lee was surprised to find Yankee garrisons —who might have been a big reason the people were cowed—still in the vicinity of Frederick. Lee, according to Long, thought the Yankees would abandon Maryland as soon as they saw the Southern forces approaching. So important was Maryland strategically to the occupying Yankees, they weren’t going anywhere it seems.

But was Lee’s advance into Maryland an invasion or a liberation?

Long was there at Lee’s side that fall of 1862 so he was an eye witness to the campaign. It seems absurd, however, that he should on the one hand mention the many Marylanders who rode with Lee into Maryland intent upon rescuing their own people from the Yankees and on the other hand express disappointment that Marylanders didn’t rally to the cause when Lee reached Frederick...those who could fight and would fight were already with Lee or somewhere fighting.

Jefferson Davis relates in his own memoirs that he had entertained no hopes himself that the citizens of Maryland would rise up and join the Southern troops. Davis intimates in his writings on Sharpsburg that he understood that there were no men of fighting age sitting around waiting for Lee to liberate them and that the old men, women and children of Maryland were completely under the despot’s heel while the younger men were long gone to war.

How sad it is though that Lee himself did not live long enough to actually write his memoirs...Long compiled letters and added his own remembrances and put all of this into book form calling it Lee’s memoirs. But it would have been helpful to have had Lee’s perspective on the liberation of Maryland. Unfortunately the great Southern general died in his late fifties while his old, vulgar nemesis Grant went on to tell his war stories and to serve as President of a new, nationalistic United States. Lee loved Maryland. He would have helped us understand why rivers of blood flowed in the cornfields of Western Maryland one September long ago.