Bill Clinton's Appreciation of Franklin Pierce Finds Bragging-issue

California’s Fort Bragg Target of Name Change Through SB 539

 

 

by Braxton Bragg Wright CPW News Service

Braxton B. Wright

 

According to the Fort Bragg Advocate News and Woodlands Daily Democrat names associated with the Confederacy are as endangered as the Stars and Bars of the rebel flag.

“Fort Bragg will not have to change its name because of SB 539,” Fort Bragg Mayor Dave Turner said this week. “When I first heard of this I talked to our Senator, Mike McGuire. He spoke with the author of the bill, Senator Glazer, who assured him that could not be construed to cover city names," the two papers reported.

"Glazer introduced SB539 to bar state and local properties from taking the names of elected leaders or senior military officers of the Confederacy. Public places currently named after Confederate officials would have needed to choose a new namesake," said the Fort Bragg and Woodlands papers.  

Patrick McGreevey of the LA Times noted that the name change would include two California schools named for Confederate leaders including Robert E. Lee.  "Braxton Bragg who sat out William Tecumseh Sherman's march from Atlanta to Savannah in Augusta in Walker County, Georgia also refused to surrender with Robert E. Lee at Appomattox....a strange actions for a Confederate General that Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest threatened to kill with his own hands if Bragg's inexplicable and apparently cowardly decisions got in the way of Forrest again," said Lowell P. Wigglesworth, an outspoken critic of U.S. history textbooks and dominant teachings.  "It's mythology folks and it's bad for you," said Wigglesworth.

  Responding to the news one commentator wrote a rebuttal to Glaser’s proposal with concern that the changing of such a name would remove an important reference to a real person, a real place and a real history that deserves to be remembered, however problematic.  He writes:

 

 If the name of Fort Bragg is changed how will we know that it was named for General Braxton Bragg whose brother, Thomas Bragg, was the Attorney General for the Confederacy? How will we then be able to wonder why William Tecumseh Sherman was working before the Civil War in the SF Bay area to consolidate the railroads there working with George C. Bragg before he went to Vicksburg to level the logical Mississippi rail crossing site before proceeding to Atlanta to Savannah to turn the South's proposed transcontinental rail terminus on the Atlantic coast into pretzels? How will we know that Braxton Bragg and Sherman were business partners before the Civil War or that Sherman headed back to SF after the war to complete what he had started or, curiosity permitting.....that Jefferson Davis laid out the Savannah to San Diego flatland route in the 1850's that had Caleb Cushing and Franklin Pierce drooling and leading Bill Clinton to claim that Pierce's legacy as a poor President who allowed, unintentionally, a "drift toward war" is more prevarication?
 
     President Clinton will make in his speech at Georgetown University in 2015 and repeated in New Hampshire in 2016, that Franklin Pierce allowed this "drift toward Civil War" because of the death of his son on a train.....an event that influenced what Clinton called Pierce's inability to prevent a Civil War.  The letter between Jeff Davis and Pierce shows anything but a "drift".   The writer continued.......

     How will we be able to trace the fact that in 1850 the opium cutter, Frolic, built in the Gardner shipyard, Baltimore (Thomas Layton, Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and Opium Trade, 1999, Stanford Univ. Press), sank near Fort Bragg. How will be able to trace through Jefferson Davis' letters* at the Jefferson Davis Project at Rice University the fact that Jefferson Davis, Caleb Cushing....New England's leading opium trader with John Perkins Cushing.....and relative of "Lincoln's Commando" William B. Cushing.....and Franklin Pierce were close friends who saw the arrival of Abe Lincoln as a perfect storm for a Civil War that placed according to Thomas Layton, Fred Bailey, later known as Frederick Douglass, an opium cutter builder from Gardner's shipyard in Baltimore, as the great abolitionist orator who spoke at Boston's Faneuil Hall after Jefferson Davis had spoken there at Cushing's invitation?

 

How can we speculate on the strong possibility that the Civil War was fought on the "high moral ground" of abolition when it was really a drug deal gone incredibly bad with 600,000 dead who fought over the flat southern rail route from Savannah to San Diego keeping it out of the hands of the South until 1867 when Alfred Nobel stabilized nitro glycerin with the invention of Dynamite? How can we then speculate that when the most despised Confederate General, Braxton Bragg, was, in fact, a shill for the railroad boards and China Traders?

 

Leave the name of Fort Bragg alone, for true history's sake! " 
    

     Wigglesworth sees the migration to the Northern California coast of prominent New England China Trading families as a direct result of their long-term business plan focused less on Sutter's Mill gold found in 1849, than on the renewable "white gold" of the Middle East's opium poppy.  "Yes, while in New England you had the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,  advancing the medicinal value of opioids and even coining the word "anesthetics" there were Cushing physicians like John Cushing whose son, Sidney, built a railroad in Mill Valley across the bay from San Francisco.  Dr. John Cushing was a good friend of John Muir for whom Muir Woods was named, but Cushing also named his local haven Blithedale after "Blithedale Romance" from his 1825 Bowdoin College classmate's, Nathaniel Hawthorne's, writings.  Franklin Pierce was their upper classman from Bowdoin graduating the year before Cushing and Hawthorne in 1824.   Is this important for young Americans to understand before they offer themselves up on a battlefield in Helmand Province in Afghanistan where the very same opium poppies that are the economic engine that run the place can be grown nearly anywhere in the world and are as ubiquitous as the salt upon which Ghandi focused a revolution in India?  Damn right!" said Wigglesworth.   "You need to know about every aspect of the mythology that has defined us as a people before you allow yourself to be cremated on the altar of someone elses' carelessness....and Bill Clinton's word salad about Franklin Pierce is definitely a Caesar Salad dressed over with Clinton's smarmy lies, just as he lied about Mena and Monica," said Wigglesworth.

     Wigglesworth has shown how U.S. drug policy and law, influenced as they were by Supreme Court judges like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. established a wide-ranging program of protectionism for some and exploitation of others.  "Is it any wonder that the Union Army's finest artillery commander was future pharmacist and founder of one of the U.S.'s biggest drug companies, Eli Lilly?  Amputations need opioids.  Was it any wonder that when FDR proposed a social security program that moved in the direction of universal healthcare that those who controlled this rigged system attempted to remove FDR with a fascist coup that motivated two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, General Smedley Darlington Butler, to write his book War Is A Racket," said Wigglesworth.

*"When Lincoln comes in he will have but to continue in the path of his predecessor to inaugurate a civil war and, leave a soi disant democratic administration responsible for the fact. Genl. Cushing was here last week and when we parted it seemed like taking a last leave of a Brother."  -Letter of Jefferson Davis to Franklin Pierce, Jan. 20, 1861.