[The Woke Revolution: Up From Slavery and Back Again by H.V. Traywick, Jr. (Shotwell Publishing LLC, 2025; 101pp.)]
The essays of H.V. Traywick, Jr.—available on the Abbeville Institute website—have attracted much attention for their ardent defense of the South; and the Shotwell Publishing Company has put us in their debt by publishing these essays in a book, in so doing making them accessible to a wide readership. In this week’s column, I shall endeavor to summarize some of the book’s main themes. Some of these themes will be familiar to many readers, as they reiterate material that other writers of the author’s persuasion have already presented; but they are vital points that bear repeating.
Traywick notes that the defense of the South is of much more than antiquarian interest, because the campaign against the South lies at the basis of the “woke” movement of our times. As he puts it,
Their military victory at Appomattox in 1865, and their subsequent arbitrary political power during Reconstruction, set them on their “Long March” towards the fulfillment of their ambitions for a totalitarian government under their control. Their Puritan hatred of the South was in full flower during the 2020 “summer of love” with the vandalizing and destruction of Confederate war memorials all across the South.
Traywick continues:
As Tennyson wrote, “Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain To leave an equal baseness…” Thomas Carlyle said that it takes men of worth to recognize worth in men. Among the many worthy men across Western Civilization who recognized the worth of General Robert E. Lee was Sir Winston Churchill, who summed it up by saying that Lee was one of the noblest Americans who ever lived and one of the greatest captains in the annals of war. But the Lee Monument in Richmond was vandalized and desecrated by mobs of rioting “wokelings,” and taken down by the groveling scalawag Governor Ralph Northam, who, loving his office more than his honor, said that Lee no longer represented the values of Virginia. Judging by the filthy graffiti that desecrated the Lee Monument, before it was taken down to the cheers of the mob, I would say no truer words have ever been spoken. What remained was an empty traffic circle full of trash and drug paraphernalia as a monument to the moral depravity of this Age without a Name. We are in a Marxist revolution rife with Puritan overtones. Critical Race Theory merely replaces traditional Marxist class warfare with race warfare, with White people—and particularly Southern White people and the conveniently long-dead Confederacy—designated as scapegoats for all the racial ills in the Yankee Empire, and apostates deserving the fate of Salem witches in John Winthrop’s Puritan “City upon a hill.” Ever since the Spring of 1864, Southerners have been on the defensive. No war was ever won on the defensive, but we have spent barrels of ink explaining the righteousness of our Cause, often mistakenly confounding the many causes of secession with the single cause of the war, which was secession itself. That is what the war was “about,” and what we were fighting for was simply our independence from those who would deny it, just as in 1776, when the thirteen Colonies seceded from the British Empire. But rather than hammering our detractors with this simple Truth, we instead get ourselves into involved defensive explanations that cause their eyes to glaze over, and when the defense rests, they calmly look at us and say “Slavery.”
Contrary to our contemporary mythologists, Abraham Lincoln did not invade the South in order to end slavery, which remained legal in the border states that remained in the Union. Further, one cannot say that the war was fought to prevent the South from bringing slavery into the territories because, once the South seceded, it would have no access to them.
Why, then, did Lincoln invade? Like Thomas DiLorenzo and Mark Thronton, Traywick stresses economics: the North was financially dependent on the “duties and imposts” collected at Southern ports. Traywick also points out that the North was attempting to impose a mercantile system on the South, forcing unfavorable terms of trade upon it in order to build up Northern industry:
After the [Revolutionary] war, New England (and eventually the industrializing Northeast as a whole, with its growing sectional majorities and its tendency to centralize the powers of the Federal Government into its own hands) developed the same mercantile relationship towards her sister agricultural States in the South that England had previously enjoyed with her colonies. In both cases the balance of trade became exploitative against the Periphery. In both cases it drove the Periphery to secession from the Core-controlled economic system. In both cases it drove the Core to launch a war of conquest against the Periphery in an attempt to drive it back under the Core’s control.
The end of the War between the States brought terror to Southern whites, but the erstwhile slaves were worse off than they had been under the Confederacy. According to Edward A. Pollard, the editor of the Richmond Examiner during the war, “We may take from Northern sources some accounts of these contraband camps, to give the reader a passing picture of what the unhappy negroes had gained by what the Yankees called their ‘freedom.’”
Pollard continues:
A letter to a Massachusetts paper said: “There are, between Memphis and Natchez, not less than fifty thousand blacks, from among whom have been culled all able-bodied men for the military service. Thirty-five thousand of these, viz., those in camps between Helena and Natchez, are furnished the shelter of old tents and subsistence of cheap rations by the Government, but are in all other things in extreme destitution. Their clothing, in perhaps the case of a fourth of this number, is but one single worn and scanty garment. Many children are wrapped night and day in tattered blankets as their sole apparel. But few of all these people have had any change of raiment since, in midsummer or earlier, they came from the abandoned plantations of their masters. Multitudes of them have no beds or bedding—the clayey earth the resting place of women and babes through these stormy winter months. They live of necessity in extreme filthiness, and are afflicted with all fatal diseases. Medical attendance and supplies are very inadequate. They cannot, during the winter, be disposed to labor and self-support, and compensated labor cannot be procured for them in the camps. They cannot, in their present condition, survive the winter. It is my conviction that, unrelieved, the half of them will perish before the spring. Last winter, during the months of February, March, and April, I buried, at Memphis alone, out of an average of about four thousand, twelve hundred of these people, or twelve a day…
I was very glad to see that Traywick uses an argument that is a favorite of my own. At the behest of the Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens, the Southern states seeking readmission to the Union had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. But how is this possible? Before their readmission, the legislature of a former state had no standing to ratify it: it is only actual states, not prospective states, that can do so. But once readmitted, it is up to the state whether to ratify and cannot be compelled to do so. The whole point of the cumbersome ratification procedure in the Constitution was to allow the states to check the power of Congress to alter the Constitution. A system in which Congress can require ratification destroys this essential check.
I hope that Traywick’s outstanding book receives the attention it deserves.
