Also please get in your 2002 dues if you haven't already done so.
Come to the monthly meeting and bring a friend with you. Volunteer to help on a project. Run for office in the camp. Become an active member.
Truly this is the way to build our camp and keep our Southern Heritage alive and working. This country is coming together, and we as Southern Americans can become a bigger part of it.
Let me remind you also that 2002 dues are now due. Please take time to pay them as soon as possible, as this takes a lot of work off of our camp Adjutant. See you at a camp function or meeting.
Gerald Thorn
Commander
On-site registration will be $18 per rider and $12 per passenger. The event will benefit the Captain James W. Bryan Camp 1390, Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Southern Legal Resource Center.
Registration and staggered start will be from 9-11 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 3, at Hog Heaven, 1425 Broad St.
The barbecue will begin at 12:30 p.m. at Niblett's Bluff Park with live entertainment by "Nuff Said" and/or "A2-FE."
Semmes' Battery First Confederate Light Artillery will provide a living history camp at the park. Confederate battleflags will be given to all registered riders.
The first prize will be a custom leather Confederate battleflag jacket, second prize $150 cash and third prize $75 cash. There will also be numerous door prizes.
To register or for more information contact Camp 1390, SCV, P.O. Box 300, Lake Charles, La. 70602; (337) 439-3217, or email [email protected]. Checks should be made out to Camp 1390, SCV.
In addition, at least one SCV member was reportedly seriously injured in the Pentagon attack. We also have members and children of members currently serving in the armed forces and who will no doubt do the organization and nation proud in the ongoing counter-attacks on terrorism.
And one can hardly drive anywhere in the South without noticing the widespread expressions of patriotic fervor and devotion to the ideals on which America was founded.
Yes, the South is once again proving to be a patriotic partner in this great constitutional republic. Let us all pray for our troops now going in harm's way to defend our liberty.
God Bless America and God Bless the South!
Michael D. Jones, editor
 | Local historical reenactor and General Pierre Beauregard impersonator, Thomas Watson, greeted and escorted Emily Lapisardi of Pittsburgh, Pa. who gave a one-woman performance of famed Southern heroine, Rose O'Neal Greenhow, at the War Memorial Civic Center in DeRidder. |
The talented young actress, just 18-years-old, who showed an amazing grasp of the historical character, drove to DeRidder with her father and uncle after her airline ticket was canceled because of the Sept. 11 attacks that has disrupted flights everywhere.
Johanna Pate of DeRidder, representing the sponsoring organization, Emma Sansom Chapter of the Order of the Confederate Rose, said the group was willing to postpone the event but the young actress, in the best tradition of the theater, insisted the "show must go on."
Mrs. Pate, who is also Louisiana OCR president, said the event was a fund-raiser to purchase flags for a color guard for Maj. Jesse M. Cooper Camp, Sons of Confederate Veterans, in DeRidder. The proceeds will be used to buy flags for the camp color guard.
Rose O'Neal Greenhow was a Confederate spy who worked for Louisiana General Pierre G.T. Beauregard in Washington, prior to the First Battle of Manassas, Va. Greenhow later gave her life for the Southern cause when she drowned while trying to run the Union blockade with gold from Europe. The Order of the Confederate Rose is named in her honor.
Miss Lapisardi, in her performance, captured the style of speech, gestures and, most difficult, spirit of the times.
She wore a magnificent gown true to the 1860s women's clothing styles, right down to the petticoats and accessories. The petticoats contained secret pockets to carry messages and a secret message decoder.
In reliving Greenhow's life story, Miss Lapisardi recounted that the Southern heroine was a native of Maryland who was a great admirer of former Vice President and Senator John C. Calhoun, who shaped her political view of the world.
She said that Greenhow was recruited as a Confederate agent by Beauregard's aide, Col. Thomas Jordan. She then organized a spy ring that successfully obtained information about Union troop movements just prior to the First Battle of Manassas.
Miss Lapisardi also detailed Greenhow's subsequent arrest by Allen Pinkerton and imprisonment in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington. After nine months in confinement, she was exiled to the South, where she was greeted as a heroine by President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Va.
The actress was escorted by local re-enactor and Major Cooper Camp compatriot, Thomas Watson, who has been portraying General Beauregard for years.
The State of South Carolina officially gave credit for the discovery to Cussler, saying the treasure hunter located the Hunley about four miles off Sullivans Island in 1995.
However Spence has disputed that claim. He claims he found the vessel a quarter century earlier when a fishing net snagged on the sub's wreckage.
The manually propelled Hunley, the first sub in history to sink an enemy warship, sank after downing the Union blockade ship Housatonic off Charleston 17 February 1864. The Hunley was raised from the Atlantic in August 2000 and brought to a conservation lab at the old Charleston Navy Base.
In the suit, Cussler's National Underwater & Marine Agency cited unfair competition, injurious falsehood, civil conspiracy and defamation. The lawsuit says Cussler's agency is a charitable foundation focusing on maritime heritage. Cussler is the chairman of its board of trustees.
Spence disagrees. He says he discovered the Hunley.
On the Net:
Friends of the Hunley: www.hunley.org
National Underwater & Marine Agency
Scientists, at this time, don't know what any of the crew of the hand-cranked sub looked like.
However, Hunley archaeology and conservation teams plan to reconstruct Lt. Dixon's face and with sophisticated technology that will reproduce their facial features with 98 percent accuracy, according to state Sen. Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, the chairman of the South Carolina Hunley Commission. Scientists have recovered crew remains and plan to use computers to develop images of what the crew looked like. They had no pictures of the crew except for a tin type thought to be of Dixon given to the Hunley Commission by Sally Necessary, the great-granddaughter of Queenie Bennett. She was Dixon's sweetheart and gave him the $20 United States gold piece recovered from the sub earlier this year. The coin stopped a Yankee bullet and saved Dixon's life at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. After careful analysis by the Museum of the Confederacy, researchers have concluded the photo is not that of Dixon, McConnell said. The tie, coat lapels, boots and furniture were from the postwar period, McConnell said. McConnell said exhibits at the conservation lab showing Dixon will now have to be changed. The senator said since the Hunley was discovered six years ago they have had to alter the organizational logo, exhibits, theories and images to fit the historical revelations coming from the Hunley.
About nine years ago, the propaganda war in America-at-large against Southern culture and in particular Confederate symbols began to harden from an attitude into an agenda. The South, loser of America's only home-grown war and in every sense of the word a conquered province, now became the handy scapegoat for the national guilt trip over racial equality. The result has been nothing less than a program of ethnic cleansing which has reached into every nook and cranny of Southern life.
Ground zero of this cultural holocaust is the Confederate experience, in particular its most outward and visible sign: the Confederate flag. Under the manipulations of the PC movement, the piece of cloth that former President Carter called "a legitimate American icon" has been stigmatized to the point that any person displaying it, in whatever context, is automatically considered to be a racist, and therefore to have placed himself outside the good will of America, as well to have forfeited the protection of its laws.
America's schools have become social battlegrounds where Confederate symbols are concerned. Teachers have been fired, harassed and threatened for using Confederate flags as teaching aids. Students have been beaten, intimidated and humiliated for wearing clothing or jewelry displaying Confederate symbols. Some school administrators enforce dress codes arbitrarily and selectively so as specifically to exclude Confederate items. Others directly threaten students with expulsion for wearing them.
The students realize that such persecution has no basis in law and is in fact a violation of their civil rights. Some have decided to test such policies by violating them. Others have simply been innocently seeking to proclaim their own heritage in an age when everyone else, it seems, is entitled to celebrate ethnicity.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans is a 105-year-old 501(c)(3) federally tax-exempt organization dedicated to preserving the good name of the Confederate soldier and to fostering a better understanding of his era of American history. The SCV is traditionally non-political, but because of its nature and origins it has had to adopt a quasi-political stance in order to carry out its charge to defend Confederate heritage and to protect its members as they seek to carry out that charge. As a rule the SCV has no corporate legal standing as plaintiff in these "t-shirt cases," but it considers helping to mediate, educate and offer direct assistance in such cases to be within its mandate.
Sincerely,
Roger W. McCredie
Chief of Heritage Defense
Sons of Confederate Veterans
(828) 254-6991
fax: (828) 254-4534
One of the I'll Take My Stand contributors was historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, whose essay, "The Irrepressible Conflict," explained why the industrial North's attitude toward the agrarian South made war inevitable. From the North's standpoint, Owsley said, "the South was in the way; it had to be crushed out; it impeded the progress of the machine."
What we as Southerners are caught up in is the attempted completion of this process. A century and a half of war, destruction, political subjugation and economic exploitation still has not completely erased the South's sense of itself as a proud and separate nation. This doesn't sit at all well with a government and media establishment still bent on making America one homogenized cultural Wal-mart. The de-Southernization of the South must now be completed at its final and most important level -- that of its culture and heritage.
But the process is not the walkover that "those people" thought it would be. The way has been cleared for the Castorina Confederate flag t-shirt case, out of Kentucky, to be re-argued; it may well reach the U. S. Supreme Court. Former CiC Griffin won his suit against the Veterans Administration to allow the Confederate Flag to be flown at Point Lookout Cemetery (although the opposition has filed a last-minute appeal that seems superfluous). The Confederate Flag still graces the municipal seal of Lake City, Florida, in spite of threats, protests and dire predictions by the NAACP. And in South Carolina, travel and tourism figures for last fiscal year were up 11.1 per cent in spite of the NAACP's much-ballyhooed boycott. (The New York Times, which has never been known to cut the South any slack, called the boycott's impact "a drop in the bucket of South Carolina's $7 billion tourism industry.")
The most spectacular evidence that Southerners are willing to stand up for their heritage, however, came in Mississippi, where voters refused, by a 2-1 margin, to surrender their true flag with its Confederate canton in favor of a pallid design that came to be called "the pizza flag." This has both dumbfounded and infuriated the forces of the politically correct, whose invective against the good people of Mississippi has now reached the level of hysteria. It also has them worried; Mississippi's success at the polls has jump-started South Carolina's and Georgia's restore-the-flag initiatives.
And it is against this background that, on Monday, June 18, the Sons of Confederate Veterans will launch a Confederation-wide day of protests against those who have sought to take our heritage from us, or who have collaborated in that process. As I write, in late May, each division is preparing a list of sites to be picketed and making arrangements for the actual demonstrations to be supported by telephone and e-mail campaigns.
This is a historic undertaking for the SCV. We are specifically not a political organization, yet within constitutional parameters we are making a political statement. We are taking our case directly to the rest of the American people, bypassing a media establishment that ignores us except to defame us. We are doing so in the sincere belief that an informed public will help us turn the tide of cultural battle against our oppressors.
By the time you read this column, our day of protests will be over. The work of carrying out the charge laid down to us by Gen. Stephen Lee, however, will continue unabated. We can only hope, as Stonewall put it, "that an ever-kind Providence will bless us with success," and strive to be worthy of the task to which we are called.
Deo vindice,
Roger W. McCredie
Chief of Heritage Defense
 | The South's Defenders Monument, Lake Charles, Louisiana |