Dixieland Deceived

I recently finished reading Mike S. King’s Dixieland Deceived: The Grand Conspiracy Behing the U.S. Civil War. While I share in large measure the author’s thesis that “there never has been, and there never will be, a revolution of ‘the people’ that was not conceived, organized, incited and funded by a network of conspirators,” many of his presuppositions and conclusions therefrom cannot be allowed to pass without comment. He assumes motives not in evidence and erects a superstructure which concludes that Abraham Lincoln was a would-be Redeemer President, and that rank-and-file Southerners were duped into believing otherwise.

So, why was I still reading beyond page 21? For one thing, I’ve never really trusted in the pure patriotism of Judah Benjamin. Mr. King, rightly I think, points out that Stonewall Jackson, Beauregard, and Henry Wise hated him and believed he exercised an influence over the decisions and workings of the Confederate government that were out of all proportion to his subordinate offices. After the war was lost, he abandoned Jefferson Davis in Georgia and made a new and successful life for himself as a barrister in Rothschild’s London. On parting, he had given Davis assurances that he’d meet up with him in Texas after wrapping up some loose ends in the Bahamas. Yeah, right. But the author goes beyond the pale in then questioning Davis’s loyalties. He suggests that Davis would have followed Benjamin out of the country had he not been captured!

About the only high official in the Confederacy that is accorded due respect is Alexander Stephens. Even then, he bases that respect solely on what he calls Stephen’s ‘white supremacy honesty’ in the cornerstone speech. Mr. King is a devotee of Peter Marshall in his views of antebellum slavery. He doesn’t mention, if he’s familiar, with the 1833 Johnson v Tompkins opinion of Pennsylvania Supreme Court Judge Henry Baldwin which states that, “the foundations of the [Federal] government are laid, and rest on the rights of property in slaves — the whole structure must fall by disturbing the corner stones — if federal numbers cease to be respected or held sacred in questions of property or government, the rights of the states must disappear, and the government and union dissolve by the prostration of its laws before the usurped authority of individuals.”

He also completely sides with Andrew Jackson’s Force Bill against South Carolina in the nullification crisis. It’s conveniently forgotten by the author, and many others since, that the States ratified the Constitution only for specified purposes, and reserved the right to rescind their accession to the Union at any subsequent time at which they believed the general government was being utilized for their injury or oppression. South Carolina wasn’t really questioning the legality of tariffs, so much as they were reminding the Federal government that they were being exploited by them as though they were colonies, rather than equal partner state in a union from which they could withdraw.

If Andrew Jackson is to be commended for his successful opposition to a Rothschild-controlled Central Bank, he’s to be rebuked for his 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina in which he says that the Constitution forms a government, and not a league, and that to allow for the option of secession is to deny the nation. This kind of Lincoln-Webster inflammatory hyperbole is what really exacerbated ill feelings between the sections, and the Southern states rightly, if they hadn’t already, began to question the future security of self-government in an involuntary union.

The author makes much of the role of the Knights of the Golden Circle, Freemasonry, and the Rothschild banksters in assigning motives and defining events. I don’t doubt there’s much truth in it. Such was the case before, and it has been since. However, it’s beyond a stretch to say that Lincoln’s ‘saving the Union’ set the conspiracy back about 50 years until the passing of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Lincoln didn’t want to pay the banksters 24-36% interest for the money he needed to prosecute the war, but under pressure he allowed them to push through the National Banking Act of 1863. Mr. John Sherman of Ohio declared that “there had never been such an opportunity for capitalists to accumulate money.” Historian John Kenneth Galbraith explained: “In numerous years following the war, the Federal government ran a heavy surplus. It could not [however] pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.”[1]

Mr. King speculates that, had the South won, the banksters in Europe would have accomplished their purposes that much sooner upon a divided union. It seems to me that Lincoln prosecuted an unnecessary war that, on the contrary, played right into their hands then and there. I don’t doubt that there were disloyal conspirators and incompetents in high positions in the Confederate government; or even that Davis may at times have been a poor judge of character or been blinded by his own loyalty to a subordinate. Can you say Braxton Bragg? That said, I think he was an honorable man who loved his people, and I can say the same for many of his other generals and subordinates.

I can’t say the same for Lincoln or any in his administration.

-By German Confederate

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[1] Gerard Menuhin, ‘Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil’, pp. 187-188