by Clyde N. Wilson

     Although I have been in exile many years, I am a Tar Heel born and a Tar Heel bred, and when I die I will be a Tar Heel dead. Nathaniel Macon is not well known today, but he is the best possible example of the true spirit of North Carolina. Comparing Macon with the politicians of today gives us a benchmark as to how dreadfully far America has degenerated from the principles on which it was founded.
     In his time Macon was widely admired by Americans as the perfect model of a republican statesman. By republican I mean republican with a small ‘r’. I definitely do not mean the Republican Party, which, from its very beginning, when it stole the name from better people, right up to this minute, has stood for the exact opposite of what Nathaniel Macon meant by republican government.
     When North Carolina had occasion in the early 20th century to pick two figures to represent us in the Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, we chose Zebulon Vance and Charles Aycock. At the time it was natural to honor Vance, who had seen us through the horrible war of conquest waged against us, and Aycock, who removed the last vestiges of Reconstruction. That’s understandable, although it overlooked Macon, who might easily qualify as the greatest Tar Heel of all.
     Macon was born in 1758 on a plantation in Warren County, where he lived his entire life. He was a student at what is now Princeton when the War of Independence broke out in 1775. He left school and joined the New Jersey militia on active service, and then went home and joined the North Carolina troops. He was offered but refused a commission, and he refused also the bounty that was paid for enlisting. He served in the Southern campaigns until he was elected to the General Assembly near the end of the war, while he was still in his 20s. In the next few years, he was offered a place in the North Carolina delegation to the Continental Congress, which he declined. It is noteworthy that his brother John voted against ratification of the new U.S. Constitution in both conventions of the sovereign people of North Carolina to consider that question, and that my State did not ratify until the first 10 amendments were in place to limit the federal government, especially the ninth and tenth.
     As soon as the U.S. government went into operation, Hamilton and his Yankee friends, claiming that they were acting in behalf of “good government,” began to turn the government into a centralized power and a money-making machine for themselves by banks, tariffs, government bonds, and other paper swindles that would be paid for out of the pockets of the farmers, who produced the tangible wealth of the country. To oppose this, Macon accepted election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the Second Congress. He served in the House 24 years and the Senate 13 years, representing North Carolina in Congress from 1791 to 1828, from the age of 33 to the age of 70, when he retired voluntarily. He was Speaker of the House for six years, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in both the House and Senate, and finally President Pro Tempore of the Senate. He received numerous overtures to be a candidate for Vice President and was twice offered appointments to the Cabinet, all of which he turned down. During all this time he never neglected his duties as Justice of the Peace and militia officer in Warren County. His last public service was to preside over the North Carolina constitutional convention of 1835, and he died two years later. The city of Macon, Georgia, Randolph-Macon College, and counties in Alabama, Tennessee, and Illinois, as well as North Carolina, were named for him.
     During all this time, Macon was admired because he never changed from the principles with which he began. What were these principles? The federal government should be tightly bound by the Constitution. It should not tax the people and spend money any more than was absolutely necessary for the things it was entitled to do, nor go into debt, which was just a way to make the taxpayers pay interest to the rich. Eternal vigilance was the price of liberty. Power was always stealing from the many to the few. Office holders were to be watched closely and kept as directly responsible to the citizens as possible. A few words from Macon in Congress often stopped bills that proposed supposedly attractive measures. It might be nice to pay for everybody to go to college, or to build a fancy temple for the Supreme Court, or to issue bonds for rich people to invest in, or overturn a dictator 5,000 miles away. But the politicians had no right to take away the citizens’ earnings for whatever they thought was good. The Constitution told them what they could do.
     History showed that the stronger and more centralized a government became, the less free were the people. And the richer the government and its politicians and beneficiaries became, the poorer were the people. That was what had always happened, but America, with governments created by the people, had a chance to avoid the bad tendencies of government of the past. As time went on, Macon realized more and more that preserving true republican principles was a losing cause, but in the company of John Randolph of Roanoke and John Taylor of Caroline, he never wavered, even when most of his fellow Jeffersonians were willing to yield some ground.
     The offices Macon held are not the important thing. Today politicians scramble to get into office so they can have honor and importance as well as make money and flatter their vanity. But Macon, like Washington and Jefferson, was not important and respected because he was elected to office. He was elected to office because he was important and respected. He never campaigned for an office. He never attended a party caucus. He never promised anyone patronage to support him. Macon was elected over and over and revered because of what he was.
     John Randolph of Roanoke, literally on his deathbed referred to Macon as the wisest man he ever knew. Thomas Jefferson called him “the last of the Romans,” and he meant that as a high compliment—that Macon was the model of a selfless patriot and a principled republican. In fact, Macon was more Jeffersonian than Jefferson himself.
     The American Founders much admired the heroes of republican Rome—which is why George Washington has a statue in a toga—Roman heroes like Cincinnatus, who was plowing his fields when they came to him and said the republic was in peril. He left, took command of the army, defeated the enemy, and then returned to continue plowing his fields. He sought nothing for himself, only to serve his country and maintain its principles. This was the kind of republican hero that Macon represented to Americans. He valued the respect of his countrymen, but had no ambition for profit or glory for himself. It was men ambitious for glory and profit who had subverted freedom throughout history.
     A negative opinion of Macon was expressed by President John Quincy Adams in his secret diary. He excoriated Macon for being responsible for defeating many of Adams’ schemes for a stronger and more meddlesome federal government. Adams, in the typical Yankee way, thought Macon opposed him only because he was not as smart as Adams himself. This even was written in secret at the same time Adams was trying to persuade Macon to be his Vice President.
     Good Americans of the Founding and for several generations thereafter praised the idea of “republican simplicity.” A free government of the people did not need the fancy costumes and ceremonies of European courts. This is why Jefferson walked to his inauguration in a plain suit, delivered his State of the Union message in writing rather than preaching to the assembled congressmen like a monarch on a throne, and made his White House social events as informal as possible.
     Here is something else important to note about early American history. Genuine Southern aristocrats like Jefferson and Macon believed in government responsible to the people. The Northerners, who had no claim to aristocracy, wanted to use the government to aggrandize themselves. President John Adams rode around in a coach with white horses and insisted on being addressed as ‘Your Excellency’. When Macon was living at ease among his 70 slaves, John Adams was fortifying his house in fear that American mobs might attack him like they were doing in France. Of course, Macon, like all the other Jeffersonians, knew without doubt that Northern attacks on slavery were malicious, counter-productive, and driven by lust for power rather than benevolence.
     Here is another interesting fact about the North and the South that never gets in the history books. The history of the Revolution is written as if those who were fighting it were striving to achieve a strong central government for Americans. This is a lie promoted during the 19th century. It was true of some Revolutionary soldiers like Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall. But it was not true of John Taylor of Caroline, James Monroe, St. George Tucker of Virginia, Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, Thomas Sumter and Andrew Pickens of South Carolina, or James Jackson of Georgia. These and many others had fought the Revolution to get out from under a government that was levying taxes and sending troops and bureaucrats to restrict the liberty and prey on the property of Americans. They did not want to establish a government that had too much power and was too remote from the people, even if it was an American government. And, while New Englanders who had served three inactive months in the militia lined up to claim federal pensions for Revolutionary War service, the Southerners refused to accept money taxed from the people for doing their duty.
     Government had to be kept as close to the people as possible. North Carolina in the beginning elected the General Assembly anew each year, and the General Assembly chose the governor for a one-year term. Macon opposed the change to longer terms in the constitutional revision of 1835. You can imagine what he thought about U.S. Senators serving six years and federal judges serving for life. These were no longer responsible to the people. Officials had to be known to the people and reviewed frequently to make sure they were behaving and not exceeding their powers. Politics should not be a profession. Politicians should make their own living just like everyone else. They were just citizens performing temporarily a service who would soon return to private life and live under the laws they had made.
     Macon owned much land and many slaves and was a national hero. Yet he lived very simply in a rather remote location, so remote that I confess I once spent half a day driving around Warren County with three different sets of directions and never found it. He attended the Baptist Church accompanied by his slaves. He was buried very unostentatiously. As far as I can find only one portrait was ever painted of him, the one that was customarily made of Speakers of the House.
     Nathaniel Macon summed up his philosophy in advice to a young Tar Heel: “Remember, you belong to a meek state and a just people, who want nothing but to enjoy the fruits of their labour honestly and lay out the profits in their own way.”
     By the end of his life Macon had realized that the cause of republicanism was lost at the federal level, and also that the North was determined to exploit and rule the South. South Carolina tried in 1832 to use “nullification,” state interposition, to force the federal government back within the limits of the Constitution. After he read Andrew Jackson’s proclamation against South Carolina, Macon told friends that it was too late for nullification. The Constitution was dead.
     The only recourse was secession—there was nothing left but for the South to get out from under the “Union” and govern itself.
     Thirty years later, in the spring of 1861, the North Carolina convention met to unanimously ratify secession. Nathaniel Macon’s son-in-law, Weldon N. Edwards, was in the president’s chair.
     Nathaniel Macon left us an invaluable legacy from which we can learn much about the way things should be.

Clyde N. Wilson [send him mail] is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina.

We must be doing something right. Nothing keeps Liberals awake at night more than knowing that there are genuine Southern conservatives out there, somewhere, living and breathing and enjoying our lives. The Southerner isn’t even off the launching pad yet, and take a look at the kind of attention we’re already getting from someone who writes from pcwhite2@gmail.com:

Why can’t you crackers realize that the reason you lost the so-called “War of Agression” is because God wanted you to lose? God hated your lying bastard foreparents and their perversion of His Word employed to prop up the South’s slaveocracy. It’s funny to me how you silly crackers pine for the days when, in reality, had you lived back then, the Southern aristocracy would have barely tolerated your presence.
        The Confederate flag is the flag of traitors and God-haters. It should be condemned to the dustbin of history.

by John Remington Graham

A review of:
Redeeming American Democracy: Lessons from the Confederate Constitution
by Marshall L. DeRosa
Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2007, 176 pages, hardback, $15.96.
It can be purchased here.

        Some years ago I was prompted by a friend to read Dr. DeRosa’s earlier work on the permanent Confederate States Constitution. I was pleased to see a revival of interest in this forgotten subject. In his new book, DeRosa recapitulates some of his earlier points, and is now also rich in information about President Franklin Pierce, the wartime decisions of the courts of the Southern States, and, even more interesting to my way of thinking, is his penetrating analysis of the mischief in recent attempts to frame a constitution for the European Union.
        The Confederate States Constitution was obviously destroyed by the conquest of the Old South. But not all understand that the American Civil War—that’s what it was, a reenactment of the war between Roundheads and Cavaliers at the time of Charles the First—also destroyed the United States Constitution as originally framed in the Philadelphia Convention and implemented upon the inauguration of George Washington. Both American constitutions were destroyed by the events leading to the surrenders at Appomattox Court House and Durham Station. But whereas the people of England were soon able to appreciate the crimes of Oliver Cromwell, and thereby to restore their constitutional order, we Americans have not yet been able to appreciate the crimes of Abraham Lincoln, and thereby to restore our constitutional order. That indispensable awakening still awaits us.
        In the Philadelphia Convention, Nathaniel Gorham, who chaired the committee of the whole, believed that the Union then being designed would eventually break up into parts as it grew to greater-than-optimum size. In debate he said it was inconceivable that the United States would remain one nation after 150 years. Alexander Hamilton knew that the Union was not meant to last forever, and plainly said as much in the 9th and 16th numbers of the Federalist. George Washington understood during his first term as President that a fissure between the North and the South was probably inevitable, and he said so to members of his cabinet when he vetoed an unconstitutional bill for apportionment of representatives in Congress. Washington’s urging in his Farewell Address for continued Union between the North and South was expressed to his generation. He hoped the Union would last as long as possible, but he offered no godlike vision of all future generations, for he was a practical man with his feet on the ground.
        Historically, the Confederate States Constitution was a normal and anticipated outgrowth from the original United States Constitution, which included mechanisms based on legal tradition for lawful secession of States and formation of new continental order for North America. The truth is that power would be more beneficially and securely distributed today if we had three instead of only two Unions above the Rio Grande, each protecting its own traditions and civilization, all interacting peaceably by treaties as the United States and Canada have successfully done since the War of 1812. The United States Constitution is timeless, precisely because it was designed not to last forever. No government is practical or safe unless it can be dissolved and transformed by rational processes of fundamental law without violent revolution.
        The intended meaning of the United States Constitution slumbers as an historical memory no less than the Confederate States Constitution, yet both are priceless as models for confederacies yet unborn. And here is why Dr. DeRosa’s unique scholarship is so important for us all. If our children and grandchildren are to face the future effectively, they must understand the perfections and faults of not one, but two American constitutions. The need for broader understanding becomes more urgent as we witness the grim prospects which were adumbrated in the proposed constitution of the European Union—framed by short-sighted bureaucrats with no understanding of history, brimming with atheistic humanism, seeking to establish a giant superstate with unlimited powers, expressed in incomprehensible gobbledegook, hundreds of pages in length, unveiled in 2003, made worse by amendments in 2004, then derailed at least for the time being by referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005. Dr. DeRosa is an expert on recent constitutional misadventures of the European Union, and one of his chapters provides a nice introduction to this hideous excrescency.
        A Union too weak, illustrated by the Articles of Confederation, can be dangerous, as can a Union too strong. But the peril in our age comes from attempts to build multinational governments that are too centralized. This lesson becomes evident from comparison of the Holy Roman Empire, which was relatively decentralized yet lasted a thousand years, with the firmly consolidated German Empire which lasted only 50 years and ended in utter ruin. Then there was the more top heavy Third Reich, which lasted only twelve years and induced even greater tragedy. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens sensed in his time that the remedy for disorder among nations is a graceful and balanced confederacy of free, sovereign, and independent States. And among the best attempts in human experience to build such a confederacy was the Confederate States Constitution which deserves our earnest and impartial attention. For this reason, I am grateful to Dr. DeRosa for investing a major part of his career in rediscovering this part of our legal heritage. He has not spoken the last word on the subject, but has inspired us to investigate further. Let us learn what we can before it is too late, lest we be stampeded into a new world order which would more resemble an ant hill than a paradise on earth.

John Remington Graham [send him mail] resides in St. Agipit, Quebec, and is a member of the Minnesota Bar. He is author, most recently, of Blood Money: The Civil War and the Federal Reserve. It can be purchased here.

If you are a college student or rising in high school, beware. Best not to major in any field of the liberal arts. That is, unless you’re committed to the study of oppression on the basis of gender, race, and class.
        What follows is a story from a redheaded, homeschooled, widely-known and award-winning banjo picker from Darlington, South Carolina. If you want to help him out, or if you simply like great bluegrass, performed and revised with only the best of the Southern tradition in mind, you should get one of his CDs here.
                                                                                                                                                  —Tim Manning, Jr.

From: Alan Harrelson
Sent: Thu 1/24/08 12:19PM

Dear The Southerner:
        Evidently, there is a universal disapprobation amongst our society towards Southerners. As an incoming graduate student, I gained employment here at the College of Charleston as Resident Hall Director for one of the College’s downtown dorm buildings.
        This past Monday, certain members of my staff and residents of this building inquired as to why I refused to participate in the MLK celebrations here on campus. I duly informed them that January 21 is General Jackson’s birthday as well, which is something totally anathema to the understanding of these people. Needless to say, a debate ensued wherein my staff and I discussed the merits of Southern culture, which, in their eyes, all 10 of them, does not exist. Eventually, a few residents joined in, all of whom are idiots mind you, so as to tell me that my conservative, Southern perspective on history and society is totally unacceptable.
        As Hall Director, I was personally responsible for the several hundred students living in the building, students who know virtually nothing regarding the South or its history. They told me, during our MLK conversation, things like: our country should not be Christian oriented, conservative Southerners are ignorant because they adhere to the literal Word of God, Islam is a religion of peace, farming is not a respectable occupation, we should tolerate any and all cultures and religions, etc., etc. One white boy on my staff said that he used to be just like me, and hopes that one day I will shed my ignorance and come to be like him. What a moron. A black boy on my staff said that he despises South Carolina and all of the stupid, white, patriarchal conservatives within it. I told him that the sooner he leaves the better, and that I would do anything required to assist him in that pursuit.
        Tuesday, the staff and residents signed what was essentially a petition, along with sending written complaints to the College of Charleston Department of Residence Life, requesting that I be terminated due to my “hatred towards multiculturalism.” These people made a poster with inscriptions directed towards me. The poster was placed in the lobby of the building. It said things like: “Yankees are here to stay, and there is nothing you can do about it”, “I love multiculturalism”, “I love Yankees”, “gay rights”, “Muslims are people too”, “we do not want a Southern racist in our dorm”, “tolerance is great”, etc. Is not this a delicious irony, for Leftists, who are supposedly the arch-advocates of diverse culture acceptance, but will destroy any and all people who oppose their depravity, all in the name of tolerance.
        There is much more to this story, but what it all boils down to is the College has forced me to resign solely because of my unashamed pride in my being a conservative, white, Christian, South Carolinian.

Alan Harrleson [send him mail]

Charleston, South Carolina