Once we get past the trivialization that has happened to Memorial Day, our thoughts often turn to the Hollywood version of war. We think of the spectacular battles, the mighty warships, the waves of bombers and fighter aircraft, the tanks and the paratroopers. While those are truly the tip of the spear, they are all backed up by a support foundation, without which they would have no bullets to fire and no fuel to fly.

Let’s consider just one example. My father served as an officer on the USS Cumberland Sound – a seaplane tender in the Pacific during World War II. The men of the Cumberland Sound kept the sea planes flying that protected the fleet that fought the battles.

For Want of a Nail

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

This Memorial Day, let’s remember all those who served and fought for their country.

The following photos are from the web site of the USS Cumberland Sound (AV-17). All photos were taken by my father, William Clay McGehee. Take a moment or two and visit the site for a part of history that few are aware of.

Loading Ammunition

Life at sea

PBM being hoisted aboard

Worship service on the deck well forward. Ulithi, South Pacific

Some never returned home.

Richard Michael, grandson of Stephen Clay McGehee. Born at 4:14 this morning. 7 pounds, 15 ounces. 20 1/2 inches.

No one is “born” a Southern Gentleman, but allow me a bit of liberty in this instance. I can assure you that Richard Michael will be raised to be a Southern Gentleman. Richard Michael joins his cousin, Ethan David, as our second grandson; the happy parents are Richard and Sarah. All are doing fine and are already back at home.

I am truly blessed with a wonderful family.

The Cumberland Sound was commissioned in 1944, the war ended in 1945, and the ship was decommissioned in 1947. What a short life for a ship with a crew of over a thousand. The Cumberland Sound was a sea plane tender. She was one of those unheralded service ships that kept the fleet going. You don’t see sea plane tenders in the war movies, and the men who served on them don’t have tales of glory to tell. They simply did their job and they did it well.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to take a glimpse into the past to see how men served. More than that, I hope you can come away with a greater appreciation for the importance of the unseen work that must be done. A leader understands that leadership means service to others.

Do we really understand where our blessings come from? How many times do we off-handedly say “God bless you” without giving any thought to the fact that God HAS richly blessed us.

I want to point out one of the reasons that we have the freedom to celebrate Thanksgiving to our God – the men who have fought and died to preserve our freedom. As I was clearing out some of my father’s papers to clean up for our Thanksgiving Day dinner, I found a reminder of the sacrifice that generations past have made. This is the Thanksgiving Dinner menu for those aboard the U.S.S. Cumberland Sound, AV-17 in 1944.

Part of the crew of the U.S.S. Cumberland Sound, AV-17. My father is the officer in the front row on the right.

One matter that I was completely unaware of is that South Carolina was governed explicitly as an aristocracy, and there is ample discussion of that – enough that I look forward to learning more about it.

Another subject that caught my interest on a more personal level is the role – and rationale – of the abolitionist Cassius Clay, cousin of Henry Clay. These men are among my ancestors, and that is where my middle name came from (a middle name that I share with my father and my grandfather). Heavyweight boxer Cassius Clay (who later changed his name to Mohamed Ali) was named after Cassius Clay with the understanding that he was an abolitionist. He was, indeed an abolitionist, but I am confident that his father who named him was quite unaware of exactly why the original Cassius Clay embraced abolition. The article points out that Clay hoped to make Kentucky into a White ethnostate, and outlawing slavery was the means to exclude Blacks from that state. History has many little nuances like that when we take the time to look beyond the official “approved” story. Was this motivation more wide-spread? Was that part of the North’s enthusiasm for abolition? Interesting questions that beg for answers.

At 4574 words, this is not a short article. If you are not prepared to read it in its entirety, then either understand that you may be missing key points, or don’t start at all. Read it with an open mind and you will gain a much deeper insight into the circumstances that led up to secession and the war, what the political landscape looked like, and perhaps even a few “alternative futures” had things gone differently. This is “Part 1″ – I look forward to reading what follows.

Estonia - May 1990

The following was first posted here on July 22, 2010. I am re-posting it after reading an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about The Singing Revolution – a documentary that is scheduled to air on PBS Saturday at 3:00 pm EDT and Sunday at 11:00 pm EDT. This month marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. To gain a better perspective of what that meant to those under Soviet rule, this is from the narration of that documentary:

But Estonia’s darkest and bloodiest chapter began in 1939 when the Soviets crossed the border. Within months thousands were executed, others disappeared. In one night 10,000 men, women and children were taken from their homes, loaded into cattle cars, and shipped to slave labor camps in Siberia. More than half never returned… But Estonians fought, and sang, and survived.

Culture is what united the Estonian people. Culture is the vehicle that carried them to freedom. It is our great Southern Culture that unites us as a people. It is that same Southern Culture that will determine the fate of future generations of Southerners.

•  •  •

My grandmother was born and raised in one of the Baltic states (Latvia), so I find myself drawn to cultural news from that area. A video has been making its way around the web recently that shows tens of thousands of Estonians gathered together to sing songs that unite them as a people. In June 1988, spontaneous night singing demonstrations took place in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania calling for independence from the Soviet Union. It was the singing of folk songs that reminded them that they are a single and unique people united together as a nation. Estonia is a Nordic country, and as you watch the video, it is obvious that they are, indeed, one people united by blood and culture.

What does this have to do with Southern culture and the goals of the Confederate Colonel project? This is about preserving a culture – A culture. This is not a “multicultural” event. Diluting a culture by mixing in other cultures does not strengthen it – mixing cultures weakens all those involved. The social diseases of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism” have as a chief goal the destruction of Southern culture and the Western European heritage that it is based on. Note that cultures can be, and often are, adopted by others who may not be native-born, but wish to assimilate into that culture. In other words, we are talking about a culture and not blood inheritance. The key point is that those born “outside” actively assimilate into the culture without the culture adapting to them. That is the only way to preserve a culture while still accepting others into the native land of that culture.

(Note: The sound drops out in the last few seconds of the video.)

This is a trailer of a film about The Singing Revolution:

The Lyrics

Keep in mind that these lyrics were done as a literal translation, and words and cultural memory don’t always make a smooth transition from one language to another.

Isamaa Ilu Hoieldes
(Cherishing the Beauty of the Land of my Fathers)

Keeping the beauty of fatherland.
Fighting against the enemy:
Pay attention, pay attention,
Pay attention, pay attention!

If you believe in yourself,
In opinions of the wise,
In shoulders of the strong,
In mightiness of the elders,
In nimbleness of young men,
In sisters, brothers,
Above all in yourself,
Then you get better life.

If you believe the talk of the wolf,
Fear the yelps of the dogs,
Hear the curses of the masters,
Complains of the underlings,
Bitings of the greedy,
Admonishments of the low ones,
Scolds of the blind,
Then you get nothing.

If you sink into lies,
Stooping into dreams,
On all fours under the order,
Bowing under the rouble,
Then you get fleas in groin,
Itches in your heart,
Halters on your head, bones in your stomach,
Then you go to hell.

If you believe in yourself,
Then you believe in the folk,
In the farms, in the wiseness,
In the teaching, in the rights,
In the birch grove of home place,
In the swallow by the clouds,
Then you get mighty spirit,
Then you get better life.

Also, here is an interesting blog article about this event.

In any discussion of slavery, it would be a good idea to include the institution of indentured service. An indenture is essentially a limited term of slavery which is entered into voluntarily and benefits both parties. This was basically the practice of signing a contract that bound a person to a servant/master relationship for a specified period of time in exchange for something of value. In the case of my grandfather, it was in exchange for teaching him the trade of stone-mason.

Indentured service is, of course, not the same as slavery – not by a long shot.  It has a very clear end date; at least it was supposed to. The main reason that indentured service was outlawed is that unscrupulous masters would contrive reasons to extend the term of indenture by claiming that the servant had unpaid debts that had to be repaid before the terms of the indenture were satisfied.

In many respects, a properly executed contract of indenture is essentially the same as a young man signing up with the military. He is provided with food, housing, medical care, clothing, and other benefits. He is taught a skill that may (or may not) be a valuable skill when his contract ends. In return, he is subject to their rules, must obey all lawful orders without question, and cannot simply walk away from his term of service.

Take a few moments to read over this agreement. Indentured servant agreements are no longer legal, and while they may be viewed as barbaric, I suspect that our society is worse off for that. It was signed between two willing participants in which both benefited. My grandfather would never have been able to afford to go to school to learn a skilled trade like that, so becoming an indentured servant gave him that opportunity.

Some people will make the point that relatively few people owned slaves and that their ancestors certainly did not. I can’t make that statement because mine did. What I can do though, is use what information I have about that situation to try to shed some light on the subject.

The family sawmill

First, the basic facts: My great-great grandparents owned at least one slave. He was known as “Uncle Henry”. It was common practice to refer to slaves as “Uncle” or “Aunt”, giving them the status of semi-family. Uncle Henry had a son named Dave Wilson, who continued working for the family long after slavery had ended. Dave Wilson is shown here in this photo on the far left side. The tall man in the center is my grandfather, so this spanned several generations of my family. I think it is a fairly safe assumption that if the family slaves had been poorly treated as popular myth would have us believe, we would not have seen Dave Wilson in this photograph.

Slave graves in the McGehee family cemetery

Another factor to consider is what happened after the slaves died. If they had been treated and thought of as little more than beasts of burden, wouldn’t they have just been buried in a shallow pit somewhere in the woods? In this second photo are slave graves. They are in the family cemetery near the top of McGehee Mountain in Clay County, Alabama. There is a fence surrounding the cemetery, and the slaves are not buried off in some remote location – they are buried inside the family cemetery right beside the rest of our family. The idea of “separate but equal” really comes into focus here.

Obviously, we cannot say that this is representative of the lives of all slaves, but I have read a number of first-hand accounts – including those of former slaves themselves – who were treated quite well. That doesn’t make it right or good, but it does offer compelling evidence that The South was not filled with sadistic slave masters as the Northern-directed history would have us believe.

[07/23/2013 – edited to remove YouTube video clip that no longer exists]

The history that it is based on is the life of a prominent Mississippi planter, Edward McGehee. They lived at Bowling Green Plantation, just outside of Woodville, Mississippi. On October 6, 1864, Union troops routed the Confederates and then galloped up to Bowling Green Plantation which the Confederates had used as their headquarters. The Union soldiers dragged out Edward McGehee, his wife, and daughters, then burned the house. Today, only the porch columns remain, rising out of the undergrowth.

In the fall of 1864, the family of seventy-eight-year-old Judge Edward McGehee of Wilkinson County was subjected to even more egregious treatment by troops of the Third United States Colored Cavalry. On October 6, this unit, commanded by Major J. B. Cook, raided Judge McGehee’s Bowling Green plantation; ransacked the mansion; ordered the judge, his wive and their three daughters to vacate the house within twenty minutes; and burned it to the ground. The pretext for this vindictive act was simply that McGehee had been providing food to Confederate troops in the vicinity. Alerted by a pal of smoke rising over Bowling Green and by the tearful pleas of a faithful McGehee servant, a neighbor rushed to the scene and found “the House in ashes & the family sitting in the yard with a small pile of wearing apparel,” virtually the only items saved from the house. During the course of the incident, according to family members, both the judge and his wife were physically abused by the Negro soldiers. Major Cook, however, categorically denied that any of this men had struck either of the elderly residents. “I would have shot any one on sight had I witnessed such a thing,” he declared vehemently. By all accounts, McGehee behaved with exemplary dignity and restraint throughout the entire ordeal. Whatever the truth concerning the alleged assaults, Major Cook later conceded that the order from his superior to burn Bowling Green was “very cruel and very unjustifiable.”

¹

A Harvard University study concluded that Woodville, Mississippi (incorporated in 1811) best typified a Southern town preserving the traditions, customs, and culture of the antebellum South.

The McGehees had originally emigrated from Scotland to Virginia in the seventeenth century, pushed south to Georgia, and then moved westward first to Alabama, then Mississippi, and eventually, even to Texas. The influence of this enormous, sprawling family upon Young cannot be overstated. From them he received a lasting admiration for family life, a sense of belonging, an awareness of his own identity, and a commitment to high personal standards of honor and integrity. Much of Young’s Southerness and his agrarian humanism derives from the McGehees to whom he always referred as “my people.”
²

Edward McGehee was a successful planter by any definition of the word. He owned 29,800 acres of land and 825 slaves. His estate before the war has been conservatively placed at $2,717,000. His good friend, President Zachary Taylor, said of him, “the best man I ever knew… I have known him to lift a drunkard from the road into his buggy and take him home.” He offered him the office of Secretary of the Treasury, but Edward declined, preferring the independence of a private gentleman.
³