DARK SIDE OF THE FALL

Southern Song Raises Ire

By Flavius Rucklehouseman CPW News Services

     Southern singer songwriter, John William Williams, also known as “Savannah Slim” has written a foot stompin’ Southern ballad that has some historians up in arms.

     “Not Lowell P. Wigglesworth,” said Williams.  “You have always heard that ‘when the myth is swallowed as truth, print the myth’?  Well, that’s total bovine diarrhea.   I mean that is exactly what happens, but in my case, it was like being told that you are a nitwit for not being born in New York, Baltimore or Boston and that you were inferior just for being a Southerner,” said Williams.

   William’s song Dark Side of the Fall has angry historians saying that he is a revisionist-historian-music-meister. 

Fort Donnelson and Henry,

A turnkey job well done.

By Buckner, Bragg and others,

As doors wide open flung.

And in poured Irish brothers

Potato farmers' sons

All lookin' for a future

Through canons, swords and guns.

The great Nate Forrest said,

"I'm gonna kill you Braxton Bragg,
For runnin' with Will Sherman
The old railroad barons' nag.
It ain't the life I've chosen
It's chosen for us all.
In the land that's East of Eden
Of the dark side of the Fall.
Nate left the KK kickers.
Boot lickers of the lie.
Said "ride the rails to China,
Sell them pie up in the sky.
Go sail the Cushing cutters
They'll chase the Great White Whale.
Til' across the plains are ridin'
Four men on horses pale."
 It ain't the life I've chosen.
It's chosen for us all.
In the land that's East of Eden
On the dark side of the Fall.
The day will come I'm believing.
When it all will be real plain.
When the house we've been dividin'
Starts circle'n its drain.
And seeds that we've been sewin'
Will start to choke us all.
In the land that's East of Eden.
On the dark side of the Fall.

 

FR:  Let’s take that first verse.  There are some who seem to think that this indicates that the two most important Southern forts for the defense of the pre-Civil War South’s rivers and tributaries….essential for commerce and defense….were given up as an early inside job benefiting the North?

 JWW:  That’s exactly what it was and all the historians might as well have been smokin’ crack for missing the truth of it.  Lowell Wigglesworth didn’t miss it and he goes all the way to tell about who owned the Southern railroad from Atlanta to Savannah that was William Tecumseh Sherman’s prize.  Wigglesworth has it correct. Sherman was destroying the Eastern terminus of the South’s flatter rail route to the China Trade and the opium, spice and silk supplies.  The Russells in England and New England and the Hamiltons in New England and Scotland were connected to England’s Chinese opium trade.  Whether you were Aaron Burr or William Walker, this was the ultimate prize.  The Civil War was a race for opium under the guise of ending slavery.  Today in China we have slavery propped up by the systematic export of Western industrial technology. The Civil War funded the railroad to the West Coast as well as stopping the Southerner's China Trade ambitions.  The British had developed the China Trade with its opium core…a product that has many, many uses and sells itself in perpetuity.  The poppy fields of Turkey, India, Pakistan and especially Afghanistan are so enticing that the U.S. military will not leave, but as with our Civil War neither will they announce the real motives for fighting that war.

FR: So with the Brown raid on Harpers’ Ferry in poured New England’s newest immigrants the Irish who were fighting for the North? 

JWW:  They were arriving from the Potato Famine, but they were the ‘gofers’ for the British Empire and hated being that.  Henry VIII's daughter, Elizabeth, was the "Bastard Queen" and not Roman Catholic.  John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Roman Catholic Irish supporters in Boston and others in  Baltimore where the family of Alexander Brown whose companies would morph into Brown Brothers Harriman and Brown and Root and Kellogg Brown and Root, were mostly Irish Catholics or converts to Protestantism as they increasingly identified with the Puritan Protestant power elites in the New World. They had arrived on the success of Oliver Cromwell's rebellion in England. The early Irish weren’t too much unlike German Hessians and in the 1930's when Joseph P. Kennedy considered uniting the Irish and German Hessian Huns of Hitler's Reich against the Brits all hell broke lose from Winston Churchill and FDR.  That cost Ambassador Kennedy his job. A hundred years earlier it appeared patriotic for the Irish to join the Union cause during the Civil War, but beneath it was as much a need to advance their own fortunes as of freeing African slaves to pursue theirs.  This is evidenced by the entrenched Boston racism that betrays the JFK  and RFK legacy they also proudly claim. The Irish get used whether by the Scots against the Brits or by English speaking Texans against Spanish speaking Mexicans.  It's an old ploy for beginning and ending sectarian strife in what becomes known as a "civil war".

FR:  You seem to be saying that Nathan Bedford Forrest who was an early member of the KKK, though not  its founder, left it when he figured out that he was being used by the KKK as he had been used by Braxton Bragg and Bolivar Buckner.   When they lost the battles of Forts Donnelson and Henry, Forrest was left dangling in the wind.  Forrest was accused of slaughtering black Union soldiers during those battles.  You say….“Nate left the KK Kickers.  Bootlickers for the lie.”

JWW:  “Of the lie.”  That’s right.  Shelby Foote who has said that his historical research did not include studying original documents….an absolutely astonishing admission for any serious historian….was the protégé’ of Walker Percy, but more importantly, Foote hung a single photo of a Confederate General above the desk in his Memphis study, Nathan Bedford Forrest's.  He was fascinated with Forrest.  I believe that was because Foote knew damn well that Forrest figured out the whole twisted drama.  Bragg was hopelessly compromised as Lowell Wigglesworth has so eloquently shown and Bolivar Buckner’s life choices demonstrates their compromise as well?   Who along with Joseph Johnston, William Tecumseh Sherman and Phillip Sheridan carried General Ulysses Grant’s casket to the grave?  Bolivar Buckner! Buckner was appointed by Bragg to throw in the towel to Grant at Forts Donnelson and Henry.  Surrendering to Grant, Buckner was sent to Boston where he would later be released to return to the war.  He surfaced along the Gulf Coast where the Southern rail route would snake West of the Mississippi and along the old Santa Fe Trail laid out personally by Jefferson Davis in the 1850’s.  But during the war Forrest told Bragg that if Bragg ever got in his way again, as Bragg was famous for doing to Forrest, Colonel N.B. Forrest would personally kill Bragg himself…..sullied no more!   The Civil War was, in the words of General Smedley Darlington Butler, "a racket" and that's what Colonel Theodore "Ted" Westhusing learned when he confronted General David Petraeus before his mysterious death in Iraq's Green Zone.

The memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest has been commandeered by both sides for their own purposes and both have missed the truth of it.  Shelby Foote, as it sadly turns out, is just another pimp for the proper line as he could not speak the truth of Forrest's summations openly in his life-time.

In 1964, Louise Claiborne-Armstrong a descendant of another Fort Donnelson and Henry soldier, Col. Thomas Claibourne, who came to Forrest’s defense against allegations of a slaughter of black Union soldiers by Forrest, commissioned Shreve and Company of San Francisco, jewelers, to make a gem studded mace.   She had the silver mace made for the University of the South in Swanee, Tennessee which incorporated several of her most precious jewels. Her blue/white four-carat diamond was set in the cross that topped the mace. The shaft was of enameled walnut.   A gold band circumscribed the silver globe.  The mace was controversial from the start.  Mrs. Claiborne-Armstrong donated it with the words “To the Glory of God and In Loving Memory of General Nathan Bedford Forrest”.   It was all the while assumed that Forrest was an alumni of the Episcopal Church-related University of the South, but also as a founder of another institution... the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest did not start the Klan and neither did he attend the University of the South.  He was the Klan’s first Grand Wizard, but ordered the Klan to disperse in 1869, the same year that the Transcontinental Railroad’s completion brought Reconstruction to an abrupt end.   The North having demolished the South’s rail ambition’s across the flat Southwest, Forrest knew that Braxton Bragg and Bolivar Buckner and perhaps Col. Thomas Claibourne, whose sealed papers contain significant correspondence with Braxton Bragg, weren’t what they appeared to be.  Forrest was unhappy with the violent descending course that the Klan was taking.   The Klan has been revived twice. It has left something of a blight on the General’s name, but I believe that as misdirected as any slavers were, he was a fine soldier and a perceptive analyzer of reality’s dark alliances….so earning Shelby Foote’s respect.

The University of the South’s motto is “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for the brethren to dwell together in unity,” from Psalm 133.   Well, for some, but this is way down upon the Sewanee River not too far from Hatfield and McCoy territory and the folks are as divided as William Sloane Coffin was from McGeorge Bundy, Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles or as the two Skull and Bonesmen William Hart Benton was from Prescott Bush or William Ayers or Jim Morrison were from their fathers.  University of the South’s alumni William Alexander Percy was guardian of his second cousin, Walker Percy, who wrote cryptically about the problems.  George W. Bush’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, another University of the South alum, had his own difficulties in helping others to live up to the school’s motto.   There was nothing cryptic about the resurrection of tactics used to fuel the Civil War in Iraq that were honed during the American Civil War.   Bowen has never talked about the misappropriation of Forrest’s memory, though Shelby Foote’s mentor, Walker Percy, has indirectly done so when he wrote in God and Race (p. 178):

     What a bad joke: God saying: here it is, the new Eden, and it is yours because you’re the apple of my eye, because you the lordly Westerners, the fierce Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths, believed in me and in the outlandish Jewish Event even though you were nowhere near it and had to hear the news of it from strangers.

     But you believed and so I gave it all to you, gave you Israel and Greece and science and art and the lordship of the earth, and finally even gave you the new world that I blessed for you. And all you had to do was pass one little test, which was surely child’s play for you because you had already passed the big one.

     One little test: here’s a helpless man in Africa, all you had to do is not violate him. That’s all.     One little test: you flunk!

FR:  What proof do you have that railroad from Atlanta to Savannah was the prize for William T. Sherman?

JWW: Lowell P. Wigglesworth has laid that case out with a passion and clarity that far surpasses my abilities.  He has claimed, and this is well documented in many places, that William Tecumseh Sherman handed the San Francisco Transcontinental terminus to Leland Stanford just before retuning East to conduct his fiery raid on the Atlanta-Savannah leg of the railroad.   Sherman was working for the railroad on the northern end of San Francisco Bay near Fort Bragg, named for Braxton Bragg, but Sherman was also working with George F. Bragg who took orders from William Chapman Ralston of the Bank of California and the Sacramento Valley Railroad Company that circumscribed the San Francisco Bay and was handed over to the Union Pacific after the Civil War.  Justin Nicholas Tyme has covered this side of Wigglesworth’s historical research in the article Varon, Beechloss Scorn Wigglesworth: Dr. Lowell P.Wigglesworth’s Thesis Supported by Dr. Max Pierrre Revue’.  Alexander Brown’s Baltimore and Ohio Railroad would be incorporated into the Union Pacific whose chief engineer after the Civil War was Union General Grenville Dodge, William Tecumseh Sherman’s right hand man.  Dodge was at the sacking of Vicksburg where the Southern Railroad would likely have crossed the Mississippi and Dodge was with Sherman on his march from Atlanta to Savannah as they tore up the rails and twisted them into ‘Sherman’s bow ties’.

   The Atlanta to Savannah railroad was owned by the Cuyler and Cromwell families.  The Claibourne and Cromwell families were intermarried in England as any analysis of these family’s genealogies clearly reveal.  Of course, the Puritan Protestant contributions to both England and New England cannot be underestimated and informs politics to this day as any member of the Roman Catholic Percy and Kennedy families will attest.  The flames of civil discontent were furthered by the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Laws with the first test case originating at the Brown’s Merchant Shot Tower in Baltimore, Maryland with runaway slave, James Hamlet.  Alexander Brown, the patriarch of the Brown clan that would morph over time into the Brown Brothers Harriman and National City Bank that Smedley Darlington Butler laments would clearly evolve from Baltimore.  Henry Bowman Cromwell was engaged by Brown to run the screw propeller marine line of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.  This would take him to Savannah and Charleston, but Cuyler’s and Cromwell’s control of this line from Atlanta to Savannah is clear.  By 1861 Cromwell had sold his ships as blockage vessels to the Union Navy and left the rail in the hands of the Confederacy, but built the “George Washington” and the “Oliver Cromwell”.  Thus he began replacing his ships with faster ones.  Sadly, had they followed George Washington’s lead there would have been no Civil War based on the abolition of slavery.  He freed his slaves by his advanced directives in 1799 over sixty years before Fort Sumter.  Had the South followed Washington's lead the Civil War would have been fought for what it truly was….a race for the Middle East’s and Orient’s opium, silk and spice markets lacking the cover of abolitionism.  It would have been called what it really was anyway...."the greedy money grubbing SOB's war."  Braxtons Bragg was the great uncle of Columbia University sociologist, C. Wright Mills, who wrote The Power Elite that fleshes out General Dwight D. Eisenhower's warnings about the unbridled growth of the U.S. military industrialist complex.  The Southern Transcontinental Railroad route was abandoned partly by the arrival in 1867 of the newly patented explosive of Alfred Nobel, dynamite.   Following the Russell's Pony Express route across the heartland to the Northeast with dynamite that route became the North's new rail-bed linking Cushing's cutters in San Francisco to New England bypassing the South altogether.  A decade after Reconstruction ended that route would be completed enticing investments from the Scottish China Traders, Jardine and Matheson.

     Henry Bowman Cromwell, divested of his control of Southern rail interests during the war and given his Union allegiance, had simply to wait out the results of the well-orchestrated and highly propagandized war and pick up afterward where he left off.  That was before dynamite when the Southern route was more enticing.   Opportunity was knocking, however, and so he built those two fine new steamers which sailed during the war around the blockades supplied by his other ships.  The “Oliver Cromwell” and “George Washington” sailed between New York and New Orleans where Bolivar Buckner would descend after the war while Braxton Bragg landed in Galveston, also along the rail route to San Diego, California.  With Cromwell’s connections to England and England's well-established merchantile ties in the Orient, India and Middle East, as with the Russell's and Browns' in the U.S., the China Trade awaited the Civil War's winner on the West Coast.  Wigglesworth has written of it in his article Cain Cushing and Abel Brown.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest, I believe, had figured out what comedian George Carlin used to frequently say.  “It’s all bull shit folks and it’s bad for you.”  Forrest was the South’s finest soldier and his distrust of the bull shitters made his thus.  Wigglesworth has said that in another time and era Forrest would have made a great Spartacus and maybe knew that in his final years. Had he not been duped by the opportunists all around him and by the evils of slavery, he would have been an earlier Smedley Darlington Butler.

FR:  You say in your song that they should all go “chase the Great White Whale.”  That’s obviously a reference to Melville’s Moby Dick.  Why that reference?

JWW:  Because I believe that with Melville’s place alongside New England Brahman poet Walt Whitman shows us that he knew them all so well, but he was beholding to them for his livelihood.  You don’t want to tell your benefactors that they are Anglophile bigots hiding behind dredged up motives that serve to mask the real ones.  So he did what we all do.  He hid the big white lie behind the little novel one.  Moby Dick was opium pursued by what Walker Percy would call the “fierce Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths”.  Walker Percy, by the way, doesn’t defer to the possibility that they aren’t somehow superior, just that they blew it….God’s mission for them.  When you grow up in the arms of Northern European cave-dweller-fire-starters who spend their  cold winters not running from lions on the Serengeti or roaming for buffalo on the North American plains and who love to stay warm by smelting iron into swords, it’s hard to believe that you’re not superior when in the spring you wander out to chop-chop with stronger, sharper tools.  If I played on a basketball team at say Kentucky or Tennessee in the 1930's, 40's or even 50's, a white boy and a hell of a shooter and dribbler, perhaps winning the National Championship, my view of life would be skewed. That was before integration. That was before all the Nazi Eugenics was proved to be a boat load of horse shit.  Mary Harriman’s hobbies, a major supporter of the eugenics myth, were the equivalent of tallow melting and time has shown that from the mush pot of human DNA there is as likely to come a Ted Bundy or an O.J. Simpson, a Jesse Owens or a Johnny Manziel, both of the later proving their stuff in the post-protectionist age on this side of the Civil War and the 60’s Civil Rights Movement.