Good Things Happen

Good things happen when a government adheres to its Constitution and the rule of law, even in a flawed society. That's the main theme of Soldiers Just Like You. The trial of the captured soldiers of the 54th Massachussetts, black men charged with servile insurrection by the state of South Carolina, was such a case. And what a case it was.

In so many countries around the world, even today, these men would not have a stood a chance in court. But even the Confederacy, a country vilified today by its defense of slavery, believed in its Constitution and the rule of law that it authorized. It was willing to follow the dictates of its laws even if the outcome was not want the majority wanted.

When I wrote Soldiers, I had no idea that it would wrap around today's news so well. Today our adherence to the Constitution seems minimal at best, with politicians of almost every stripe (Ron and Rand Paul excluded) constantly working to find ways around it. The progressives in both parties guffawed at the reading of the document in Congress and accused those who sought to put the Constitution front and center as having some kind of fetish about it.

Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein not long ago said the Constitution was "over 100 years old" and written in language that nobody can understand. His ignorance makes me wonder whose nephew he is. How else to explain how he got his position?

The president is ignoring the War Powers Act this week because it suits him to do so and no one bats an eye. He has called the Constitution a document of negative liberties because it lays out plainly what the government has no right to do to the individual. He clearly thinks it should have set up a government that could decide who gets what and how much. Postive liberties I suppose would be a list of all the programs that a citizen could partake of. But a Constitution that puts the government in charge of a collective redistribution of wealth would be no better than the absolute monarchy we broke away from.

Left wing academics who have studied the Irish famine like to say that the famine was caused by a free market system run amok. That greedy landowners watched the Irish leave or starve so they could maximize profits. But there was nothing like a free market in Ireland in the nineteenth century. The king ruled without check. He parceled out the land, the jobs, the capital and the law as he saw fit with no Constitution to stop whatever he wanted to do. When he finally moved to stop The Great Hunger, he sent a Welsh progressive to set up a central bureaucracy to deal with the problem by handing out meager government assistance. Of course, more government interference made things even worse.

Politicians always ask the question, "How will you pay for that tax cut?" The idea inherent in that question is, "Money belongs to the state, not to the people." Or even worse, the people exist to serve the state, not the other way around. Today we think of Robin Hood as a redistributionist, one of the world's first levellers. But he is not a symbol of social justice. The king was overtaxing the people and Robin Hood simply instated a "tax rebate" of his own. He didn't steal from the rich and give to the poor. He took from the government and gave the money back to the people who had earned it.The rich were those in government, the king, his nobles, their employees. The poor were the farmers, the merchants, the skilled tradesmen--the producers and ...the taxpayers. A government with no Constitution leads to corrupt, rich leaders and a wretchedly impoverished citizenry. Is that what we want here?

The Constitution was written, (over 200 years ago, Mr. Klein,) just so this kind of government could not take root in the new country. It was devised to limit central government control of every aspect of life. If we continue to ignore its principles, we will end up just like those poor taxpayers living as outlaws in Sherwood Forest.

Or one day we will be in a court of law, brought up on some phony charge like servile insurrection. If the government wants us convicted we will be, the rule of law and the Constitution be damned. I can be pretty sure those helpless black men of the 54th Mass were anxiously rubbing their necks during that 1863 trial in Confederate Charleston. Writing letters to their loved ones, saying one last goodbye. They knew they would be hung in due course. But then...a miracle happened. The jury ruled, the verdict was certified, the court adjourned, the mob dispersed, justice was done. Even in a Confederate city under siege, miracles can happen when the Constitution is respected.

Soldiers Just Like You is based on a true story.

Sesquicentennial Succotash

There are a few things that have been cooking together in this, the summer of the 15oth anniversary of the beginning of the war.

Here in the Shenandoah Valley, many communities are planning events to commemorate the War of the Rebellion. The good people that hold the ground at the Newmarket Battlefield had a recent reenactment of that May 15, 1864 battle. Very young VMI men, known today as the Newmarket Cadets, fought Union troops under Franz Sigel in that contest. Yes, we forget how young soldiers are. The average age of the private in the CW was about 18 years. But at Newmarket many of the Virginia Military Institute cadets would be in middle school today. When General John C. Breckinridge, the Confederate commander at the battle (and the former vice-president of the United States) realized he needed more men in the fight, how his heart must have shuddered at the thought of putting those boys in harm's way.

The cadets had marched north from Lexington, that's down the valley as the Shenandoah flows by the way, to aid a failing Confederate cause that had seen wanton destruction by Sheridan's army here. VMI itself would later be burned out of spite by the villain David Hunter. That was on June 11, 1864. Does VMI remember that? Not as a matter of course, but each day the cadet corps still calls the names of the ten cadets killed at Newmarket. The battalion consisted of 247 cadets. Ten were killed, 47 were wounded and Sigel was defeated and relieved command.

A recent article in Harrisonburg's Daily-New Record chronicled the Union burning of the little Mennonite village of Dayton in the same reckless year. Speaking of newspapers, I was remiss in not mentioning a recent article in the Page News and Courier by Joe Farruggia on Soldiers Just Like You. Mr. Farruggia, a thorough journalist, left no stone unturned in his interview about me and my books, including not just "Soldiers," but Clear the Confederate Way: The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia, which was published some years ago. Thanks, Joe, for the wonderful treatment.

Another recent story in the news related that sadly an ancient oak tree with links to Gen. Thomas J. Jackson had succumbed to age and harsh weather hereabouts. Jackson's Prayer Tree as it has been called, stood for over 300 years in northern Augusta county. Accounts, one attributed to no one less than Jackson's map maker Jedidiah Hotchkiss, relate that the tree sheltered Stonewall Jackson and I assume a coterie of devout Presbyterians during a prayer meeting in 1862. With trees as well as battle heroes, the mighty must eventually fall.

Speaking of religion, The Arlington Catholic Herald, the paper of the Arlington Diocese, which includes our Valley, last week ran a story about Catholics in the Civil War. It was a good read, but as these things go, it quickly sunk into a couple of anecdotes about the Union Irish Brigade. It did mention Pope Pius IX's sympathy for the Confederate cause and even tip-toed around the fact that the longest serving pope in history had a personal relationship with Jefferson Davis.

Davis of course attended Catholic school in Kentucky for a time. Bardstown, Kentucky is the home of the second oldest Catholic diocese in the country after Baltimore. It was formed in 1808, about the same time as the dioceses of Boston, Philadelphia and New York.

Happy sesquicentennial summer!