RAMSEUR’S ELITE CORPS OF SHARPSHOOTERS...

Yankee Captain James McKnight’s regular battery had already been overrun once that foggy morning at Cedar Cree, losing a gun and several men. Now as part of Getty’s Division they waited on a low hill outside Middletown, Va. As another Rebel attack materialized out of the mist, the gunners gaped at the Confederate skirmishers loping wolf-like up the hill, howling their trademark yell.

“I could not believe they were actually going to close with us,” said one “until the men on the remaining gun of the left section abandoned it and retreated toward the old graveyard wall. Their front line was not in order, but there was an officer leading them and I distinctly heard him shout: Rally on the Battery! Rally on the Battery!” The Yankee gunners managed to fire off a last shot of double canister, “but as the Rebel veterans understood this kind of business they opened out so that the charge did not hit any of them.

”In a moment the Southerners fell in amongst the gunners, as one recalled, “amid smoke, fog, wreck, yells, clash and confusion…man to man, hand to hand, with bayonets and musket butt on their side and revolvers, rammers and hand spikes on ours!” 
The gunner’s confusion is understandable. Skirmishers were simply not supposed to close with a strongly defended enemy position, much less assault it. 

They did not know that they faced Ramseur’s Division’s elite Corps of Sharpshooters, the shock troops of the Confederacy. They were, as one former member put it, “the spike head of the Toledo Steel” that led both the advance and retreat of the army. The sharpshooters served not only as skirmishers in the usual sense, but instead as powerful combat units in their own right. As a tactical innovation, the Confederate sharpshooters were years ahead of their time, presaging both the “open order” of the late nineteenth century and the German Stosstruppen of World War I.

It has always been the objective of tyrannical regimes to silence the opposition.

The following order was issued to Union General Dix dated May 18th, 1864,”You will take possession by military force of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce… and prohibit any further publication thereof… you are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison … the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers.”

What was the Lincoln administration trying to hide, why were over three hundred newspapers in the North forcibly closed during the war? Why were there thousands of political prisoners in Northern jails? This is what one would expect to see from a despotic government and that’s exactly what it was.

Black Confederates? Why haven’t we heard more about them? National Park Service historian, Ed Bearrs, stated, “I don’t want to call it a conspiracy to ignore the role of Blacks both above and below the Mason-Dixon line, but it was definitely a tendency that began around 1910.” 

Historian, Erwin L. Jordan, Jr., calls it a “cover-up” which started back in 1865. He writes, “During my research, I came across instances where Black men stated they were soldiers, but you can plainly see where ‘soldier’ is crossed out and ‘body servant’ inserted, or ‘teamster’ on pension applications.” 

Another black historian, Roland Young, says he is not surprised that blacks fought. He explains that “…some, if not most, Black southerners would support their country” and that by doing so they were “demonstrating it’s possible to hate the system of slavery and love one’s country.” 

This is the very same reaction that most African Americans showed during the American Revolution, where they fought for the colonies, even though the British offered them freedom if they fought for them.

“There is a class of people (in the South), men women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order”  W.T. Sherman 

This type of rhetoric is excused and dismissed by the victors in their histories, but when the same extermination policy was perpetrated on Native Americans it’s called a Massacre.    Why is that?

The Wounded Knee Massacre December 29,1890
White officials became alarmed at the religious fervor and in December 1890 banned the Ghost Dance on Lakota reservations. When the rites continued, officials called in troops to Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in South Dakota. The military, led by veteran General Nelson Miles, geared itself for another campaign. 

The presence of the troops exacerbated the situation. Short Bull and Kicking Bear led their followers to the northwest corner of the Pine Ridge reservation, to a sheltered escarpment known as the Stronghold. The dancers sent word to Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapas to join them. Before he could set out from the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, however, he was arrested by Indian police. A scuffle ensued in which Sitting Bull and seven of his warriors were slain. Six of the policemen were killed.

General Miles had also ordered the arrest of Big Foot, who had been known to live along the Cheyenne River in South Dakota. But, Big Foot and his followers had already departed south to Pine Ridge, asked there by Red Cloud and other supporters of the whites, in an effort to bring tranquility. Miles sent out the infamous Seventh Cavalry led by Major Whitside to locate the renegades. They scoured the Badlands and finally found the Miniconjou dancers on Porcupine Creek, 30 miles east of Pine Ridge. The Indians offered no resistance. Big Foot, ill with pneumonia, rode in a wagon. The soldiers ordered the Indians to set up camp five miles westward, at Wounded Knee Creek. Colonel James Forsyth arrived to take command and ordered his guards to place four Hotchkiss cannons in position around the camp. The soldiers now numbered around 500; the Indians 350, all but 120 of these women and children.

The following morning, December 29, 1890, the soldiers entered the camp demanding the all Indian firearms be relinquished. A medicine man named Yellow Bird advocated resistance, claiming the Ghost Shirts would protect them. One of the soldiers tried to disarm a deaf Indian named Black Coyote. A scuffle ensued and the firearm discharged. The silence of the morning was broken and soon other guns echoed in the river bed. At first, the struggle was fought at close quarters, but when the Indians ran to take cover, the Hotchkiss artillery opened up on them, cutting down men, women, children alike, the sick Big Foot among them. By the end of this brutal, unnecessary violence, which lasted less than an hour, 300 Sioux lay dead. Official reports listed the number killed at 90 warriors and 210 women and children.  In comparison, army casualties were 25 killed and 39 wounded (mostly by their own men). Forsyth was later charged with killing the innocents, but exonerated.

Confederate cavalryman John Hunt Morgan, with a knack for raiding and disrupting Union rail and supply lines, embarked on his famed Christmas raid into Kentucky.

Morgan and about 4,000 Confederate cavalry troops under his command left Tennessee on Dec. 22, 1862, beginning a mission to harass and disrupt Union troops and supply lines in the key border state.

All told, his troopers destroyed miles of railroad tracks, cut telegraph lines, burned supply depots and briefly occupied several Kentucky towns along the way, capturing and then paroling numerous Union troops.

By Dec. 28, 1862, he approached a key objective: two tall railroad trestles of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. After an artillery barrage on two nearby Union stockades, Morgan captured hundreds of prisoners and burned the trestles.
Then, after New Year's Eve, his forces retreated into Tennessee. Many in the South would boast of his daring. By May he would be lauded by the Confederate Congress for his heroic service to the secession.

Still later in the war, he was captured and imprisoned by the Union. He later escaped, making his way back behind Confederate lines, only to be shot and killed in Tennessee in 1864.

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO JIM LIMBER...

Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote on February 16, 1864, that she saw in the Confederate executive mansion "the little negro Mrs. Davis rescued yesterday from his brutal negro guardian. The child is an orphan. He was dressed up in little Joe's clothes and happy as a lord." 

The Confederate First Lady Varina Davis recounted the story in her 1890 memoir and claimed that the president "went to the Mayor's office and had his free papers registered to insure Jim against getting into the power of the oppressor again." The free black register and other records that could corroborate or contradict her account apparently have not survived. Nineteenth-century Virginia law did not provide for formal adoption of children, so in Jim's case it was an informal adoption. 

An ambrotype photograph taken of Jim Limber early in 1865 and correspondence between members of the Davis family suggest that he was a close playmate of the Davis children. Late in April 1865, as the Davis family fled southward from Richmond, Varina Davis wrote to her husband: "The children are well and very happy—play all day—Billy & Jim fast friends as ever … "

Jim was separated from the Davises after their capture in May 1865. When the child realized he was to be separated, according to Davis, he "fought like a little tiger and was thus engaged the last we saw of him. I hope he has been successful in the world for he was a fine boy, notwithstanding all that had been done to mar his childhood."

According to a column in the SCV's magazine, Jim Limber is "a person lost in history by revisionist historians, who felt his existence would impair their contrived notions of Davis." 

Oh what wicked webs Yankees weave, when first they practice to deceive. God forbid the world should know the Davis's weren't racists...

Commentator and author Bill O'Reilly is fond of continually saying, “we need leadership in this country, WE NEED ANOTHER LINCOLN.” Just why is that Bill? 

Do we need to kill another million or so Americans, suspend Habeas Corpus and drag folks out of their beds in the middle of the night (there were thousands of political prisoners in Northern Jails uncharged and with no access to representation). Do we need intimidate voters at polling places with armed military or shut down all opposition news media in the country (in which case O’Rielly would be the first one out of a job). Lincoln shut down hundreds of newspapers in the North. 

Perhaps we need to burn down a few of our cities, hang or shoot a few innocents to make an example; disarm the border population and blockade a few of our states for the sole purpose of collecting taxes as Lincoln stated? Should we have a leader that deports his congressional opponents and incarcerates state legislators at will, allows his generals to oversee the theft of private property, rape indiscriminately and dig up the graves of his citizens looking for valuables? 

How about relocating thousands of citizens based on ethnicity as Grant did to American Jews with general order #11, or deporting and colonizing the entire black population back to Africa which was Lincoln’s ultimate goal. Entire volumes have been written about war crimes against Southern civilians perpetrated by his generals and condoned by the president, in some cases even promoting them afterwards.

Almost immediately after taking office, Lincoln became a self appointed military dictator, trampling the constitution and suspending civil liberties. He provoked a war while Congress was in recess and refused all attempts at diplomacy. The principles of separation of powers and checks and balances were nearly nonexistent. He even went so far as to threaten the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court with imprisonment. 

So just why do we need another Lincoln Bill? If it's a totalitarian dictatorship your looking for I'd suggest North korea or Cuba...