Since our last meeting on February 14th, Camp #158 members have attended and/or participated in several area events. This is the season for reenactments every year, and there are five major battles that some of our members attend or participate in annually – Battle for River’s Bridge (SC), Battle of Aiken (SC), Battle for Broxton Bridge (SC), Battle of Olustee (FL) and Battle at Manassas (GA). The middle of March will pretty much wind up most of the reenactments for the year.

During the upcoming month our camp will be planning and preparing for our annual Confederate Memorial Day Service at Magnolia Cemetery on Saturday, April 19th. I’ll be calling on members to work in the cemetery so we can have it ready for our memorial service. Hopefully all of you will make it a priority to attend on the 19th of April, and bring family and friends to this very important event.

We’ll have our next camp meeting this Thursday night at 7:00 p.m. at Sconyers Bar-B-Que Restaurant. Our program speaker will be Mr. Erick Montgomery, Executive Director of Historic Augusta, Inc. Mr. Montgomery is one of Augusta’s most knowledgeable historians on local history. He will speak on Thomas Woodrow Wilson – Family Ties and Southern Connections. He'll discuss the Wilson family and Woodrow Wilson's boyhood experiences during the War Between the States in Augusta, and the family’s contribution to the war effort.

B/G E. Porter Alexander Camp #158: http://www.eporteralexander.homestead.com/Index.html

Georgia Division SCV Website: http://www.georgiascv.com/

SCV National Website: http://www.scv.org/

www.sonsofconfederateveterans.blogspot.com

¦ Thursday, March 13th – Brigadier General E. Porter Alexander Camp #158 will meet at Sconyers Bar-B-Que Restaurant at 7:00 p.m. Our program speaker will be Erick Montgomery, Executive Director of Historic Augusta, Inc. He will speak on Thomas Woodrow Wilson - Family Ties and Southern Connections.

■ Saturday, April 12th – The 7^th Annual National Confederate Memorial Service will be held at Stone Mountain Park at 10:00 a.m. in front of the carving and reflection pool.

■ Thursday, April 17th – Brigadier General E. Porter Alexander Camp #158 will meet at Sconyers Bar-B-Que Restaurant at 7:00 p.m. Our program speaker will be Ed Wolfe, Chaplain of Ogeechee Rifles Camp #941 in Statesboro. He will speak on the recently published book, Blood Money: The Civil War and the Federal Reserve.

■ Saturday, April 19th – Brigadier General E. Porter Alexander Camp #158 Confederate Memorial Day Service at 11:45 a.m. at Magnolia Cemetery. The Heritage March from the Confederate monument on Broad Street to Magnolia Cemetery starts at 11:00 a.m.

■ Year of Davis Events: The SCV has declared 2008 the Year of Davis to commemorate the bicentennial of his birth. There are two events that every Southerner will want to try and attend: The reopening of Beauvoir in Biloxi, Mississippi on June 3rd, and the Bicentennial celebration in Fairview, Kentucky on June 7th. To borrow reenacting parlance, these are "max effort events for the entire SCV. More details will follow, but mark your calendars now, begin organizing your carpools, etc. You do not want to miss out on these once-in-a-lifetime events.

■ Friday, June 13th thru Sunday June 15th – The Georgia Division SCV 111th Reunion will be held in Villa Rica, Georgia. The business session will be on Saturday, June 14th.

[1] The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

[2] For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.

[3] Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place?

[4] He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.

[5] He shall receive the blessing from the LORD, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." – Patrick Henry

"Let us be certain that our children know that the war between the States was not a contest for the preservation of slavery, as some would have them to believe, but that it was a great struggle for the maintenance of Constitutional rights, and that men who fought were warriors tried and true, who bore the flags of a nation's trust, and fell in a cause, though lost, still just, and died for me and you." – J. Taylor Ellyson

"This army stays here until the last wounded man is removed. Before I will leave them to the enemy, I will lose many more men." – Stonewall Jackson in Winchester, VA in 1862

"Dixie's not down yet! She lives and thrives through her history and those who love her history will save it so that others can bring some of it back to life." – Maury Morris, a Virginian

"If officers desire to have control over their commands, they must remain habitually with them, industriously attend to their instruction and comfort, and in battle lead them well." – Stonewall Jackson to his commanders in 1861

"Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations." – Thomas Jefferson

The August 25 Washington Times reported that an outfit called the " United States Historical Society," which had donated a statue of Abe Lincoln to the city of Richmond, Virginia in 2003, was stripped of its tax-exempt status by the IRS. It seems that the main activity of the Society was marketing $875 miniature replicas of the statue and pocketing the profits.

The reason the Society lost its tax exemption is that the erection of a Lincoln statue in Richmond was considered by many Richmonders to be akin to putting up a statue of Hitler in Tel Aviv or of Stalin in the Ukraine. Several affluent and influential Richmonders made it a point to bring to the attention of the IRS the real activities of the U.S. Historical Society. They waged a four-year campaign against the organization and its spit-in-your-face gesture of placing the Lincoln statue in their home town, and they won. The statue remains, of course, and is managed by the National Park Service, which partnered with the United States Historical Society. The statue is a fitting tribute to Dishonest Abe, now that the sponsors of the statue have been revealed to be, let us say, less than honest and straightforward. After all, enriching oneself and one’s friends while hiding behind a smokescreen of "humanitarian" propaganda is a major part of the Lincoln legacy. (The U.S. Historical Society claimed that the statue would "promote healing" in Richmond!)

Lincoln himself was a corrupt corporate insider and a lifelong mercantilist. The economic policies that he spent his entire adult life championing – protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for railroad and road-building corporations, and inflationary central banking – were nothing but an Americanized version of the corrupt British mercantilist system that the American Revolution was fought to discard. They were all designed to use the powers of the state to benefit a small, politically powerful cabal of (mostly Northern) manufacturers, bankers, and politicians at the expense of the rest of society. They were also designed to enlarge the state by tying all of these powerful interests to it politically. They were all finally adopted, after some seventy years of political debate over them, during the Lincoln regime.

Lincoln was personally corrupt as well. In "Lincoln and the Railroads" John W. Starr recounts how Lincoln presented the Illinois Central with a $5,000 bill in the 1850s for a single tax case, an incredible sum at the time. The vice president of the Illinois Central was one George B. McClellan, who would become Lincoln’s commanding general early in the war. McClellan refused to pay, so Lincoln sued his own client. When he came to court the Illinois Central’s attorneys failed to appear and he won the judgment by default. Starr strongly suggests that it was a corrupt scheme concocted by McClellan and Lincoln since the Illinois Central, under McClellan’s direction, continued to employ him.

Dishonest Abe invested in land in Council Bluffs, Iowa, of all places, in 1857. To this day this piece of land is known as "Lincoln’s Hill." When he became president one of his first official acts was to call a special session of Congress to begin work on the Pacific Railway Act that would shower railroad corporations with government subsidies while they built a transcontinental railroad line. When Congress finally passed the bill in 1862 it gave the president the right to decide the eastern terminus of the line. And guess what? Dishonest Abe chose Council Bluffs, Iowa. What a coincidence, and what a good example of political insider trading.

All the big Republican Party gasbags of Lincoln’s time had their fingers in the governmental pie of railroad subsidies. The hate-filled and odious Thaddeus Stevens "received a block of [Union Pacific] stock in exchange for his vote on the railroad bill, writes Dee Brown in his classic history of the transcontinental railroads, "Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow." Republican congressman Oakes Ames guided the bill through congress in return for contracts to supply all the shovels for digging railroad beds from Iowa to California. William Tecumseh Sherman was sold land near the railroad line at below-market prices. The massive government subsidies, wrote Dee Brown, "assured the fortunes of a dynasty of American families . . ." They also led to one of the biggest scandals in American political history just a few years later – the Credit Mobilier scandal during the Grant administration. It was all an inevitable consequence of the triumph of Lincolnian mercantilism.

If you ever travel to Richmond and catch a glimpse of this particular piece of government propaganda, think of it as a fitting tribute to a corrupt and brutal tyrant who micromanaged the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians in and around the very city that now is forced to honor him with a life-size bronze statue. All to "promote healing," of course.