Minutes of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting and Reunion of the United Confederate Veterans Division of Texas 1907, pg. 12-18 The New Text Book Law. For the third time Texas has re-enacted the text book law for our public schools, again banishing books of a sectional or partisan character, so persistently demanded by our camps. This new law lasts for five years, ending August, 1912. An important clause was added, requiring the text book board to select histories for our public schools in which the construction of the Constitution as placed by the Fathers of the Confederacy shall be fairly presented. I presume this new departure arose from the fact that while the histories we have-been using are stale, flat and unprofitable having little vital force, other States are overflowing with literature giving the-version of the great war between the States from their own view point. It occurs to the writer that a most beautiful and romantic story of Old Glory could be dug up out of the archives of the voices of the Fathers that have fallen into innocuous desuetude because customs have changed with times. The New Constellation. On the 14th of June, 1777, the flag of our country was. brought forth by the first Congress of the Fathers, they enacting That the flag of the thirteen United States shall be thirteen stripes alternate red and white and the Union be thirteen stars, white, in a blue field, representing a New Constellation. The term union in heraldry means that part of the flag in the upper corner next the flag staff. A new constellation argress, of course, the old belonging to the old world flag emblems. Asia is the rule of one—a despot; Europe the rule of a few, but these thirteen stood for the sovereignty of the people with Sovereign States representing them. To emphasize this idea the thirteen stars, white, on this blue field were arranged in a perfect circle, with no central object—thus denoting their freedom from outside restraint, acknowledging no superior but God. Stars in heraldry indicate independent power. The blue field in heraldry represents spiritual enfoldment of a very high order of the emotional feelings. The red stripes represented the passion of war and the white the haven of peace as the aim of war. Let us follow the voice of the Fathers Six years after the birth of the flag came the peace of 1783 with the mother country. There we find the States signing the treaty as individual States, and not as the United States, de-noting very plainly- their individuality. We find that they bind themselves by the first Confederate articles of 1776 to a perpetual union, but we find them seceding from that union of first intention, and in 1787 we find them forming what they call a more perfect union in this, the present articles under which we now live nowhere binds them to a perpetuity as did the old. True, we have since then waged a great war in which, for the present, we find the victorious party decrying secession as dead and as far as the South is concerned, our troubles are over and this matter is res adjudicate as to us. But did you. ever note that no amendment reaches the point? There is no declaration against the Tenth Amendment, declaring all powers not yielded to the general Government are reserved to the States. This has never been given up, and Massachusetts be-fore this amendment was adopted put a proviso in her accession to the Union in 1787 covering this point. She acted it also when Jefferson made the Louisiana purchase in 1803, and she made threats to secede because there was no power in the Constitution authorizing the acquisition of new territory, especially so much as this which brought in more space than was in the original thirteen. And because it so overbalanced the West and South as to degrade the power of the Bast. Mark, now, two-thirds of the area of this Government lies west of the great dividing river. Population is fast following areas, and the flag must surely follow population. It is not a dream when I opine.this point is sure to be raised by the East when the canal is opened and Texas umpires the world. But let us follow up the New Constellation the Fathers dreamed about. Turn to a disinterested authority--Appletons Cyclopedia, title Flag and see Old Glory there pictured with his thirteen stars in a perfect circle. Did you know this flag fought through two wars of independence with this mystic circle blazoned on its folds. Did you know that in 1818 clerks of some of the Departments, without lawful authority, rearranged the stars as now in parallel rows and destroyed the charm of the New Constellation? Science teaches that while groups of stars have their satellites revolving about them, yet these groups have as an entirety no central sun. An interesting article in the August number, 1907, of the Literary Digest, exploits this position very fully, holding that while Alcyone of the Pleaides group was thought by some to be the central force of the universe, yet a further investigation shows that this group, like all others, are moving forward in space with no respondent superior but the Allfather. This agrees with the divine meditation of old Job: Canst thou bind the sweet influences Of the Pleaides, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst though guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest though the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominions thereof in the earth? Why should the circle be broken so carelessly? One main reason is the Fathers sat with closed doors. They met for the single purpose in. 1787 of interstate commerce. When they gathered they concluded something more must be done to insure stability ,. They bound each other to secrecy in their discussions and the debates were withheld from publication till they were most all—if not all—dead. The large States wanted more power—a strong government, the small States, in the majority, did not want to grant it, so they wrestled with each other from May till September before they could agree, and then it suited few. Silence was enjoined, that each State might construe the new instrument to suit its own views, for it had to be ratified as States, and not en masse, as you are taught. All of them at one time another, for one reason or another, have run counter to the strong government idea, aiming their protests against one branch or another, either the Executive, Legislative or Judicial arm. But before we leave the New Constellation idea let us follow the voice of the Fathers on this subject and that of using force against a State when joined to the New Constellation. During the debates more than once allusion was made to the model of these thirteen States in a circle on Old Glory as similar to the solar system, with none but God as ruler. After they had been sitting from May until July, 1787, without coming to an agreement, good old Ben Franklin, the oldest man in that immortal body, came in one morning and said, inasmuch as they had been building without asking the counsel of God as master builder, he thought it meet that they should after that open with prayer. Hamilton has been set down in history, according to the moderns, as a man of force, of coercing a State. It is true that in this convention of 1787 he brought forward a strong-government plan. Born an English subject, he knew not the New Constellation theory, but his scheme was so coldly received that he saw that his influence with that body was gone, and withdrew and was seen no more in it till toward the close. The next year when New York sat as a State to ratify or not that instrument, it was with difficulty that she could be brought to do so, so wary was she of binding herself, and when she did accede it was with the proviso that she reserved the right to withdraw from the compact whenever her interests demanded it. Virginia and Rhode Island inserted the same. Hamilton, in speaking for the Constitution, then inveighed against the use of force, and declared the idea of coercing a State to be a dream. You never see this in history, but there are two Hamiltons. There are also two Websters—the Webster of 1832, speaking against Hayne in favor of the Union, declaring it not a compact, but as having been ratified en masse by the people, and not by the States. In 1851 Webster reverses himself, from his place in the United States Senate, and in alluding to the thirteen Northern States as having nullified the Constitution and acts of Congress for the enforcement of the fugitive slave law, declared this released the Southern States affected from the compact. The histories gotten up nowadays never tell you of Webster No. 2. They are made to glorify Webster No. 1. Let us briefly trace the New Constellation idea and see when it ends. In 1798 Jefferson and Madison drew respectively the Kentucky and Virginia resolution inveighing against the alien and sedition laws passed by Adams administration, then in being, as against the genius of our idea of government. That the States alone and not Congress or the President were the arbiters of rights and umpires of wrongs done them. The idea of a Federal Court enjoining a State law was not even thought of as a part of the organic law. The protest of these resolutions turned out the Federalist party and Jefferson and the party he built under these reigned till the revolution of the 60s. Jefferson ignored the Federal appointments by Adams when he CM me in, and never ceased to protest against the absorption of jurisdiction by these as some¬thing not contemplated by the Fathers of the Confederacy. Washington called the more perfect Union a Confederacy. After Jefferson had been elected the second time congress laid an embargo against the shipping of New England which interfered with the happiness.Rhode Island in so many words declared on coming in she would most regard as a stay for her in the Union. The most remarkable instance of States arbitrating their grievances occurred during the war of 1812-14, when five New England States sent representatives to Hartford, Connecticut, and protested against a war that was ruining their ships and shops. They stopped the levies of troops and the march of troops through certain of their borders to repel the British, and proceeded so far that they selected a general to lead them. They hung out blue lights along their coasts, apprising the enemy of the movements of our land forces. You never read this in the histories denouncing the Southern States for doing similar acts in the 60s. They do not mean to include this part in the national anthem, My country, tis of thee I sing. They now jubilate over the discrimination in their favor in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment granting them all the special privileges which this amendment aimed to destroy. Yet Madison, the father of the Constitution, was then at the national helm, and was aware that they were in the line of their rights, and said nothing. The war soon ended after this Hartford demonstration, and got these patriots out of the middle of a very bad fix. Davis and Lee graduated at West Point in 1828,when Judge Tuckers commentary on the Constitution was there used, upholding this theory of the new Constellation, and the ignorant one denouncing them for the part they took in the 60s do not know that they fought as they were taught by he Government. But a decade or so later than Hartford there arose one from the South who knew not Joseph. Reared in a State outside of the charmed circle of the original thirteen, Jackson, from the backwoods of Tennessee, knew little and cared less for the voice of the Fathers. He knew that while he and his hunting shirt boys with their rifles were destroying the finest army on the planet under Packenham at New Orleans the tender New England conscience was allowing the British to march on Washington and burn the Capitol, and he sent President Madison word if he would keep those Hartford people quiet he would come with his Southern lads and drive the enemy into Canada. It was for this reason, when South Carolina essayed the role of these former examples, in her nullification law against a tariff equally as oppressive as the embargo laws to New England, that he made a bluff of force for the first time in the history of this new Constellation. The circular form of the stars had been blotted out. The Northern States were pleased, because it meant more for them in special monopoly. They were the stronger and rejoiced with exceeding great joy. Few know that South Carolina, like the other essayists of States rights, won, and that her nullification resulted in a gradual lightening of her tariff burdens. C. C. CUMMINGS, Historian Texas Division, U. C. V. Report sent to the Committee on Resolutions. Genealogy Center of the Plano Public Library System glhtadigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/documents/id/2213/rec/3
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 14:19:10 +0000
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