Prattville Dragoons SCV Camp 1524 Christmas Parade Entry

Saturday morning officers of the Dragoons gathered to assemble the float for our camp's entry for the Prattville Christmas parade.  In attendance were Commander Chris Booth, Brigade Commander Bill Myrick, Color Sgt Larry Spears, 2nd Lt Stuart Waldo, Treasurer Billy Leverette, Adjutant Wayne Sutherland and Comm Ofc Tyrone Crowley.  Commander Myrick brought his trailer with bales of hay for seating and a nice new Honda generator for powering the strings of Christmas lights.  The float included a Christmas tree with garland with a Battle flag atop in lieu of a star or angel.  The front of the float had five Confederate flags including the Battle flag and the Alabama state secession flag.  The side frames of the trailer were adorned with tinsel and lighted strings of garland.  The trailer was finished and flags were stowed until later when the float would be moved to the starting queue prior to the parade.  An enjoyable time of fellowship in preparation for the parade festivities to follow later in the evening. 

Prattville Christmas Parade

The Dragoons will be participating in the 39th annual Prattville Christmas parade tomorrow, Saturday evening, December 1st.  The parade starts lining up around 2:30pm and commences at 4:30pm.  The parade route will start in front of the Autauga County courthouse in downtown Prattville, turning left down 4th St, left on Washington St, right on Wetumpka St, right on Northington St, then right on Main St where it will finish again in front of the courthouse at the corner of 4th St and Lower Kingston.  The Dragoons will have their SCV banner and be pulling a decorated float complete with a Christmas tree, lights and garland.  There will be a number of folks walking with the float including a number of reenactors and folks in period clothes.  Candy and the treasured SCV coins will be tossed to the parade spectators along the route.  It is always a grand time celebrating the Christmas season and highlighting the Dragoons and the Sons of Confederate Veterans to the Prattville community.  Hope everyone can join the festivities and participate with the Dragoons or as a spectator and greet us wholeheartedly as we make our way along the parade route.  Check back for photos from this year's Christmas parade event.

Confederate Postmaster General's Office Historic Marker Setting in Montgomery

You are invited to the Unveiling Ceremony
for the Historic Marker at the
Confederate Postmaster General’s Office
(corner of Washington Avenue and Perry Street
Thursday, November 29, 2012 at Noon
Sponsored by the
Montgomery Area Stamp Club
 
Short Program 
Spread the Word!

Call Charles E. Brannon for further information:  334.239.8913
or Elizabeth A. Murray, President at 334.279.8018

Defense of Secession - Exactly Who are the Idiots?

Last week the Montgomery Advertiser published a letter-to-the-editor written by Prattville Dragoon Charlie Graham.  But, the Advertiser deleted the last paragraph in his letter.  Notice that his main point is contained in the deleted paragraph, found below.

The Montgomery Advertiser has been loaded with articles and editorials espousing every anti-secession angle that their little statist minds can conjure.  Secession has been referred to as absurd and ridiculous.  GOSH Moon says that it isn’t a sign that the president is taking the wrong direction or that the country is failing but rather a sign that idiots live amongst us.  I agree with him 100%.  But where we disagree is who fits in that category.

After all of the trillions that have been printed and infused into the economy with little positive result Obama/Bernanke continue to print $40 billion per month and invest in junk bonds. The deficit is screaming out of control.  Carl Hess labels economists that are concerned about this as spreading hate for a living, while the country is in fact failing. 

Daniel Haulman says that no states other than the original thirteen colonies have secession rights.  He contends that the federal government formed most of the other states.  The Constitution nor the written proclamations of the states reserving rights to secede as they joined the union do not support his opinion.   

The election brought the advent concluding that we are now a socialist republic.  That realization resounds in the minds of us who lived play by play through the cold war with the communists.  Socialism is devoid of freedom.  Misuse and repudiation of our Constitution from Lincoln to Obama and despotic government precipitates a dream in a responsible mind that is incomprehensible to the left.

Capt. Wirz of Andersonville Exonerated

From the Georgia Sons of Confederate Veterans, a press release:

COMMANDER OF ANDERSONVILLE EXONERATED AFTER 150 YEARS  

    

(Atlanta - November 11, 2012)   On Sunday afternoon, November 4, memorial services honoring Capt. Henry Wirz were held in Andersonville, Georgia, the site of one of the saddest stories of the American War Between the States. Hanged as a scapegoat shortly following the War, Captain Wirz has a tall obelisk monument dedicated to his memory in downtown Andersonville, and natives of the region who know well the truths behind the years of revisionist history hold services in his memory each fall.  Now, after 150 years, the true story of the Andersonville is finally being told as part of the Sesquicentennial commemoration of the War.

The story of Andersonville is well known, often having been told by Hollywood, writers, and historians. The true story of Andersonville is not as well known.

Established as the location of a prisoner of war camp by the Confederacy during the War for Southern Independence because of its remote location from the front of the War and because of the location of the rail depot for transport, Camp Sumter at Andersonville was one of the primary POW camps in the South during the War.

Of the 45,000 Union prisoners held at Andersonville during the War, more than 12,000 perished, mainly from malnutrition and dysentery. The nearly 28 percent mortality rate among the prisoners is a sad fact of the War but is also one that is often grossly over reported, particularly in light of the fact that at the same Camp, 226 of the roughly 1,000 Confederate guards also died from the same conditions. Approximately the same number of Confederate guards and Union prisoners died at Andersonville because of the blockade that the Union had enforced upon the South, along with the scorched earth policy practiced by Sherman as he marched through Georgia and the Carolinas. Food and medical supplies were simply not to be had at that late date during the War.

To his credit, Captain Wirz attempted to alleviate the suffering of the Union prisoners by paroling five Union officers and sending them to the Union lines to offer the prisoners at Andersonville as an exchange for Confederate prisoners. In spite of the fact that the Union soldiers reported the scarcity of food and medicine available to the Confederates in Andersonville, their pleas fell on deaf ears with Union leadership. Union General Ulysses S. Grant had enacted a nationwide ban on prisoner exchanges; knowing that the South did not possess the food and supplies to properly care for prisoners, Grant sealed their fate by refusing to even accept an offer by Captain Wirz to provide food and medical relief for the prisoners.

Following the War, Captain Wirz was blamed for the malnutrition and lack of medical service provided to the prisoners in Andersonville. His efforts to alleviate their suffering went unheard; and on November 10, 1865 at 10:32 a.m., Henry Wirz was hanged in Washington, D.C.  In an act of barbarity, his body was dismembered; and parts of it were placed on public display in Northern museums. 

For the last 150 years, both Captain Wirz and the South have been blamed for the death of the prisoners who fell at Andersonville; but little has been said of his efforts to save them or of the same percentages of Confederate guards who died at the Camp. Still less is reported of the atrocities which occurred against Confederate POW's in Union prison camps such as Elmyra Prison, New York where 25 percent of the prisoners died, or Camp Douglas, Illinois where more than 25 percent of the Confederate prisoners died as compared to less than five percent of the guards stationed there throughout the War. In fact, Senate Resolution 97, a joint resolution adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in 1865, ordered that Confederate POW's should be intentionally subjected to malnutrition, lack of medical attention, and exposure to the elements. While the stated purpose of the new U.S. policy was retaliation for the poor treatment of Union POW's, it addressed neither the problem of the South having adequate food and medicine for prisoners nor the refusal of President Lincoln to provide for prisoner exchanges in order to alleviate the suffering of Union prisoners.

For interviews regarding the story of Andersonville or for more information on the Sesquicentennial commemoration of the War, please call Jack Bridwell, Division Commander for the Georgia Sons of Confederate Veterans at 1-866-SCV-in-GA or visit online at www.GeorgiaSCV.org 

Secession Movement

Texas petitioners have already garnered over 27000 signatures to petition the federal government to allow their state to secede from the United States.  Louisiana over 16000, North Carolina over 7000 with Florida and Alabama close to 8000 signatures as of this date. http://southernnationalist.com/blog/2012/11/09/secession-poll-petition/ The following is the excerpt from this website:

How much pro-independence momentum will result from the recent US presidential election and ongoing, US-promoted displacement of Southerners? We shall see.
There is a petition for Louisiana to leave the failed Union.
And there is a poll on Texas seceding as well (as of the time of this post the pro-independence voters are at 83%).
H/T Occidental Dissent
UPDATE: An SNN reader has also drawn up a petition supporting the general right of secession.
Here are more State secession petitions: Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Virginia.

Note that these states largely represent the conservative red states and largely formerly of the Confederate States of America.  Many of the same reasons for the secession movement of 1861 is apparent today with a huge cultural divide and disagreement over taxation and federal spending and infringement on individual liberties and states rights.  Each of these non-binding petititions makes the same statement and here is the one for Alabama.  To sign the petition simply requires registering a user account and receiving a password from the whitehouse.gov website. The following provides the verbiage of the petition for Alabama's secession:

We petition the obama administration to:

Peacefully grant the State of Alabama to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.

Peacefully grant the State of Alabama to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
As the founding fathers of the United States of America made clear in the Declaration of Independence in 1776:
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive."

Alabama Secession Flag

This past week at the Prattville Dragoons EC meeting, Brigade Commander Bill Myrick showed an Alabama Secession flag which is now available from Ruffin Flag. You can contact Adam Fuqua at Ruffin at 706-678-9090.  These flags are $12 each and include grommet hardware.  Alabama was actually briefly an independent republic following its secession from the United States before it and the other original six states formed the Confederate States of America.  The Alabama Secession flag is actually two sided, with different depictions on each side.  The following is from the Alabama State Archives website (http://www.archives.state.al.us/referenc/flags/105107.html ):
This flag was presented to the Alabama Secession Convention on January 11, 1861 in the House Chamber of the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama. "While the ladies of Montgomery sewed and presented the flag, much of it was painted by Francis Corra a painter of military and decorative banners in Montgomery."  On January 16, 1861 a reporter from the Montgomery Weekly Advertiser described the flag as a "unique affair. On one side is a representation of the Goddess of Liberty, holding in her right hand a sword unsheathed, and in her left, a small flag with one star. In an arch just above this figure are the words, "Alabama-Independent Now and Forever." On the reverse, the prominent figure is a cotton plant, with a rattlesnake coiled at its roots. Immediately above the snake are the words "Noli me tangere." Also on the same side, appears the Coat of Arms of Alabama."