Renaming Jefferson Davis Highway Unjustified by the Truth of History

RENAMING JEFFERSON DAVIS HIGHWAY

There is yet another movement abroad to air-brush Confederate history and to use it as the scapegoat for all the social ills of this country. The movement is undertaken in the fashion of the Soviet Communists under Stalin, and it is one more step towards totalitarianism held together by lies, distortions, and disinformation. Today it appears in the form of a petition to remove the name of Jefferson Davis from the portion of US Highway 1 that runs through Fredericksburg, Virginia. It is a petition proposed by a professor with an agenda at the University of Mary Washington as a project for his class. The evident enthusiasm of the class for the project indicates that they have been successfully indoctrinated by what Voltaire called “The propaganda of the victorious,” which in this case states that Jefferson Davis was a traitor and that The War was fought to free the slaves. This Myth now goes unchallenged in the academy, as the evident purpose of academia these days seems not to be the encouragement of inquiry, but the inculcation of dogma. The North’s War against Southern Secession is a prime example.

There were many legitimate causes for the Southern States’ secession from the Union in 1861, but there was only one cause for The War – legitimate only if one is an imperialist. That cause was the North’s refusal to let the South go in peace. But this puts Abraham Lincoln and the United States in 1861 in a relationship analogous to George III and England in 1776. This will never do, so history must be sanitized, Soviet-style, and the North’s War of Conquest must be transformed into an Orwellian war of liberation, although in reality emancipation of the slave was merely a byproduct of the war waged against his master – just as was Lord Dunmore’s Emancipation Proclamation during the Revolution. Read Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation objectively, and you will see that it says in essence that “slavery is all right as long as one is loyal to Lincoln’s government.” President Lincoln was a white supremacist who worked to deport freed Blacks to Central America and elsewhere. Maybe the Crusaders’ next petition should be for the removal of the Lincoln Memorial. But for now we are supposed to harken to Marxist carpetbaggers and repudiate our great-grandfathers who were fighting to defend our country from invasion, conquest and coerced political allegiance – just as their fathers had done in 1776, when the thirteen slaveholding colonies seceded from the British Empire.

The petition to change the name of Jefferson Davis Highway is unjustified by the truth of history. Leaving his name on the highway does not mean an endorsement of slavery and white supremacy. It means an endorsement of our Revolutionary and Constitutional heritage, and our stand against invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance to a colossal, bureaucratic, totalitarian government. Burying that fact is the real agenda of the Marxist Crusaders who would expunge all traces of Confederate history. Leave Jeff Davis alone. He has something to teach us.

H. V. Traywick, Jr.

Richmond, Virginia