“Why Stonewall Jackson Lost His Arm”

 

“Let us cross the river and rest in the shade.”

--The final words of General Jackson.

* * *

His eyes opened slowly, his body resting

Upon grass that was greener and softer

And springier than any seen before

In his own bonny land of Virginia,

Beneath trees, towering and majestic,

Whose iridescent white flowers set amidst

The silvery green leaves were sending down

Showers of petals upon the forest floor,

And also upon him.  He rose from the grass.

His left arm, surprisingly, was whole again.

A stream, pure and unclouded, ran nearby.

The air about him seemed fresh and vibrant.

All the objects in his sight glowed, he noticed,

With a beautiful light that seemed to shine

From within.  He surveyed the scene as he had

Countless others in recent times, his soldier’s

Instincts still very much alive:  Yet even he,

Though veteran of many battles, started

At the sight of another man, in ancient

Roman uniform, a soldier like himself,

From whom an even brighter light poured forth.

“Hail Thomas!”  The radiant man’s greeting,

Full of warmth and love, embraced him, calmed him.

Yet as he approached, the General felt

An instinctive need to bow his face to the earth,

In honor of the awesome holiness

That this man possessed.  “Rise fellow soldier

Of Christ.  I the lowly one have been sent

By the Holy Trinity, Who is blessed

Forever, amen! – by your God and my God,

To escort you to your resting place here

In Paradise.”  “Paradise,” Stonewall answered,

“Is that where I am?”  He got to his feet;

The man’s light was less intense.  “It is, dear man.”

“Thanks be to God for His mercy to me a wretch!

But, if you will pardon me for asking,

Who are you, Sir, who have come to do this

Kindness for an undeserving sinner?”

“I am unworthy George, a simple soldier.”

“Nay, Sir, there is more to you than this.  What

Is the cause of this great weight of Grace and joy

That I feel in your presence?”  “All of Christ’s

Witnesses and Confessors bear this Grace;

What you find in me is only ordinary.”

“Witness?  A martyria?  Art thou a martyr?”

“I will not deny it; yes, martyred for Christ –

Glory to Him! – at His behest outside

The walls of Nicomedia during

The cruel reign of Emperor Diocletian.”

“A saint?  Can it be?  I was told you were all

Fantasies and fairy tales, gross inventions

Of the imaginations of evil men!”

“It is true:  Christ has bestowed this crown

Upon me, though I have suffered but little

For Him.  You will find that there are other

Things which differ some from what you were taught.

But you lived well according to what you knew,

Obeying your conscience.  And you likewise

Suffered without grumbling at the end of your

Life, losing thine arm after your victory

At Chancellorsville.  Therefore, the Lord says,

“Well done, good and faithful servant!  Enter

Into the joy of your Lord and Savior!”

“These words of yours bring me powerful great joy

That I can scarce contain within me, Sir Saint!

May God be adored and exalted forever,

Amen!”  And he bowed himself upon the ground

Again.  Rising, the General spoke once more:

“Sir Saint, Sir George, I perceive deep inside

That, despite the humble effacing of

Yourself, you are a mighty man before God.

Tell me if you would, for it troubles me

Greatly in my soul:  What will be the outcome

Of the war in which my fellow Southrons

Are engaged?  I asked the Lord to take my life

If it were to end in failure.  Will it

Be so?”  Saint George closed his eyes for some moments,

Standing still and silent.  He opened them

At length and said, “I felt the pain in your heart

And have besought the Lord on your behalf.

Because of our Savior’s generosity,

He has granted you to know:  The South will fall.”

Tears immediately began to fall

From Stonewall’s eyes.  Saint George spoke consolingly:

“Be not dismayed.  All is not as it seems.

The Father is far-seeing.  In future times

A terrible menace will arise in

Eastern lands, a furious persecutor

Of Christian folk in Russia and round about.

To contain the extent of that demonic

Force, Christ the God-man will require the strength

Of all the States of your old league, North and South,

And of others that do not yet exist.

Together, they will battle the Beast and serve

As a haven to those persecuted

By it.  After its defeat and downfall and

The resurrection of the Church in those lands,

The hold of the Blessèd Trinity upon

The States will be released, and they will begin

To separate again.  At this time, your people

In Dixie will be introduced to the true

And undefiled Christian Faith in large numbers,

Which to most of them has been a thing unknown.

How they choose to respond to this highest gift

And invitation of the Holy Ghost

Will determine how the future unfurls

For them.  But come, let us be on our way

To your dwelling.  There is much else to speak of

And to show you as we go.  Sing with me

The hymns of Paradise as we begin.”

‘Applauding Techno-Tyranny’

 

President Trump has recently declared his intention to stop minting the penny because doing so causes the federal government to incur a financial loss.  How much of a loss are we talking about here?  In 2024, penny minting cost FedGov $85 million (minting the nickel cost it about $18 million).

However, we also know that Mr Trump is keen on expanding the use of digital cryptocurrencies in the States, and particularly in FedGov’s acquiring a large reserve of them.  But the cost requirements to build out the infrastructure necessary for this new electronic currency are enormous.  We are firsthand witnesses of this here in Louisiana, as the two new data processing centers in Richland and West Feliciana Parishes will cost a combined $12 billion.

This is in addition to the natural resource costs involved:  rare minerals to make the microchips; natural gas, uranium, etc., to create electricity; water to cool the chips, etc.

Forgive the pun, but something doesn’t add up.  If concerns about costs are the reason to quit producing the penny, then how on earth can one justify the humongous costs of building and maintaining everything needed for digital currency?

The answer to that question is disquieting; Dr Joseph Farrell gives it:

‘Just this last Monday you might recall that I blogged about a story that Google, Amazon, and various countries, have signed on to a pledge to triple the power output of the world by means of nuclear power production by 2050. The question was, "why?", and my answer was that they need all this power to run their planned AI datacenters and their new "digital" currency system and the "cashless" world, never mind the seiniorage costs of doing so, which (I also pointed out), they never mention in their proclamations of how wonderful all this will be. As I strongly intimated in that blog, I suspect the actual costs of such a system, when compared to the seiniorage costs of the current system of paper money and specie production, are ridiculous. The Bottom Line is, they need all the increased power consumption for something, and that something, I suggest, is for their Artificial Intelligence data centers, like Elon Musk's "Colossus" center outside of Memphis, Tennessee . . .’ (‘MUSK’S COLOSSUS: HIS “NEW GOD” AT MEMPHIS’, gizadeathstar.com).

The risks involved in this new monetary system are very high for those who accept it:

‘Regardless of what the actual cost of all of this will be, the mere fact of the "gimongous" nature of the numbers themselves - gigawatts, thousands of gallons of water per minute, tens of thousands of computer chips, a building to house it all - suggest that this is a considerable amount of power of the political sort it gives its owner. And it raises again the question of why:  in a "cashless digital currency" world, he who owns such centers controls the money, and does so in a way that was only a dream for Meyer Amschel Rothschild, for that very same system will presumably be able to determine, on a case to case basis, how much an individual's "money" is "worth" or even if it is usable based on his or her "score" against rules that the AI owner himself establishes’ (Ibid.).

The risks go beyond merely the financial:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/03/garlington-applauding-techno-tyranny/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Lee and Orthodoxy’

 

(The following essay appears as a foreword to the novel With Lee in Virginia by G. A. Henty, published by Contra Mundum Press.  It is presented below with the publisher’s permission.)

The South holds a unique place in modern Western history.  While most Western countries in recent centuries were discarding Christianity and other traditional norms, the people of Dixie were doing the opposite:  defending an hierarchical view of the cosmos with the Holy Trinity reigning over all; defending Christianity, as well as traditional notions of marriage and family as found in the Holy Scriptures and in ancient Greek and Roman society; looking distrustfully upon rapid mass industrialization; upholding the slower, more humane agrarian economic system in its stead, believing that the creation is suffused with meaning and with the presence of God Himself, that it serves a sacramental function, rather than being simply ‘dead matter’ to be transmuted by factories into consumer goods and monetary profits.

While not identical in content, the South’s defense of traditional living is yet very similar to what was going on in the Orthodox world at the same time – with St. Athanasios Parios and the Kollyvades Fathers of Mount Athos, for example, or with Ivan Kireevsky, Alexei Khomiakov, and the other Slavophiles in Russia.

The closeness of Dixie to Orthodoxy may be seen in other ways as well:  in keeping the fasts before Easter and Christmas, even forbidding weddings during those times, celebrating Christmas on its Old Calendar day of 6 January, and honoring St. George at Eastertime.  There were also Southern converts to the Orthodox Faith like Philip Ludwell III as well as Orthodox settlements in the Old South, such as the Greek community in New Orleans.

There are plenty of reasons, then, for the Orthodox to be interested in the South, and vice versa.

Throughout her 417-year history, a number of Southerners have exemplified Dixie’s traditional Christian ethos:  from William Berkeley, Robert Byrd II, and Robert ‘King’ Carter I, to Flannery O’Connor, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle – but the greatest exemplar of them all remains Robert E. Lee.

Robert Edward Lee was born on January 19^th, 1807, into the squirearchy of Virginia, his father the famous Light Horse Harry Lee, a general in the War for Independence from Great Britain, and his mother Ann Hill Carter Lee, of the renowned Carter family.  He would marry into another distinguished Virginia family, the Custises, when he was wed to Mary Custis in 1831, the great-granddaughter of George Washington’s wife, Martha; their marriage was a fruitful one, bringing seven children into the world.

Lee was a devoted Christian from his early years, attended the West Point military academy as a young man, and spent much of his adult life in the United States Army, mostly in the Corps of Engineers, but he would experience combat in the Mexican-American War in 1847 as well as at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 to quell the insurrection of John Brown.  After Virginia seceded on April 17^th, 1861, Gen. Lee resigned his commission with the U. S. Army on 20 April and was made on May 14^th a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army, in which he served with gallantry and distinction until the end of the War with the Yankee invaders on April 9^th, 1865, the day he surrendered himself and his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses Grant of the Union Army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

After the War, Gen. Lee made it his primary mission to promote reconciliation between the States and to work for the common good and upbuilding of them all.  To that end, he accepted the office of President of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia (later to be renamed Washington and Lee University) in October 1865.  There he busied himself for five years, forming the minds and characters of the young men who attended the College.  On September 28^th, 1870, while at a vestry meeting at Grace Episcopal Church in Lexington, he suffered a stroke.  He passed from this life to the next shortly thereafter, on 12 October 1870, to the great sadness of his Southern countrymen.  His final words were ‘Strike the tent.’

More than 150 years have passed since Robert E. Lee left this world.  Life has changed significantly over that time.  Can anyone, particularly Orthodox Christians, benefit at all from a closer look into his life?

Another exceptional Southerner, Richard Weaver (reposed on 1 April 1963), whose writings portray especially well the essence of Dixie’s way of life, answers in the affirmative in his essay ‘Lee the Philosopher’.  He notes that it is common to exalt Gen. Lee as a great military leader, a model husband and father, and an embodiment of Southern culture.  These are not unimportant in the present age of barbarism and promiscuity.  But, he says, there are more important things to note about Lee.  And in the characteristics that he notes, we will see how they correspond well with truths proclaimed by the Orthodox Church.

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/lee-and-orthodoxy.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Tear out the 14th Amendment Tumor’

 

Many of the federal Supreme Court’s worst rulings are justified by the 14^th Amendment – everything from anchor babies/birthright citizenship to forcing homosexual marriage upon the States.  William Watkins, Jr, in an excellent essay at the Chronicles web site (‘Time to Topple the Fourteenth Amendment’), explains how erroneous such rulings are.

Many of these rulings rely on what is known as the Incorporation Doctrine:  i.e., the 14^th Amendment’s guarantees of privileges and immunities, of due process, and of equal protection make the federal constitution’s Bill of Rights applicable to the States.  But this is not what the writers of 14^th Amendment intended, per Watkins:

‘To the extent the Privileges or Immunities Clause enforced the Bill of Rights against the states, this would have caused a major change in state practice—especially in the criminal law. States would be required to augment the use of grand juries, to grant jury trials in all civil cases where the amount in controversy exceeded $20, and so forth. But opponents of the Fourteenth Amendment never made these obvious arguments against its adoption. Why not? Because no one understood a few offhand comments about the Bill of Rights as embodying the purpose of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Moreover, the Privileges or Immunities Clause caused no great state constitutional revival—even in solidly Republican states—to conform state constitutional practice to the federal Bill of Rights. Surely, if the state legislatures that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment had understood it to incorporate the first eight amendments some of the states would have put that into law. None did.

‘Also, if the Privileges or Immunities Clause was intended to incorporate the Bill of Rights, which includes the Fifth Amendment’s due process provision, why does the Fourteenth Amendment have its own Due Process Clause? Is this a drafting error, a double security for due process, or clear evidence that Congress did not believe the Bill of Rights was incorporated? The latter explanation makes the most sense.

‘Further compelling evidence against the incorporation doctrine is found in Twitchell v Pennsylvania (1868), in which the defendant contended that Pennsylvania denied him his rights under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments by failing to state with proper specificity the manner in which the defendant was alleged to have harmed the victim. The Supreme Court denied relief on the grounds that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. Surely, the justices of the Court, sitting in Washington and aware of the great debates that had taken place in Congress, would have understood that the Privileges or Immunities Clause had worked a constitutional revolution in applying the Bill of Rights to the states. The holding of Twitchell and the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment was not even mentioned in the decision speaks volumes about incorporation.’

Furthermore, the first appearance of a decision based on this new-fangled doctrine came in 1925, almost sixty years after the Amendment was declared a part of the Philadelphia charter in Gitlow v New York.  This new jurisprudence began the current era of expansive federal power based on the 14^th Amendment:

‘Thus, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause was the engine for incorporation. For most of Anglo-American legal history, “due process” was synonymous with legal processes (e.g., grand jury indictment, arraignment in open court, and a jury trial) that the government had to follow before depriving a person of life, liberty, or property. In the decades after the Civil War, the Supreme Court transformed due process into a vehicle to judge the substance of state legislation. The Due Process Clause served as a master key to give the Court access to a wide range of state policy matters.’

Two things may be noted in opposition to this new jurisprudence.  First, the 14^th Amendment originally had a very narrow purpose, to codify protections of former slaves into the federal constitution:

‘The origins of the Fourteenth Amendment cannot be understood apart from the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that Congress enacted over President Andrew Johnson’s veto. The Act, inter alia, defined United States citizenship and required that blacks and whites be treated equally under the law. It ensured blacks could make contracts, file suit in court, and engage in real estate purchases. The Act sought to ameliorate the situation of freedmen in the South who faced state Black Codes. Some of the stricter codes prevented blacks from owning property, required blacks to carry a pass or a license when traveling, and declared any unemployed black man a vagabond. President Andrew Johnson raised significant constitutional questions concerning Congress’s power to interfere with matters traditionally left to the state governments. Thus, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction created the Fourteenth Amendment to constitutionalize the Civil Rights Act.

‘The Amendment addressed, in the words of legal historian William E. Nelson, the Northern demand that postwar governments in the South

‘“be restrained in the future from discriminating against blacks and Northerners, and that this restraint be imposed without altering radically the structure of the federal system or increasing markedly the powers of the federal government.”

‘To quote Fourteenth Amendment scholar Raoul Berger, we must remember that “the purpose of the framers was to protect blacks from discrimination with respect to specified ‘fundamental rights,’ enumerated in the Civil Rights Act and epitomized in the §1 ‘privileges or immunities’ clause.” The Civil Rights Act, in pertinent part, provided that the following were required for the freedmen to enjoy meaningful liberty:

‘“[All citizens without regard to race or color] shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.”

‘Had the Supreme Court confined Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence to the explicit purpose of the Civil Rights Act, it would not be regulating prayer in schoolhouses or running to remove the Ten Commandments from courthouse walls.’

Second, the 14^th Amendment was never properly ratified:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/03/garlington-tear-out-the-14th-amendment-tumor/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!