Confederate Shop
Today, the true understanding of just what is American – and what is America – is practically unknown. It’s certainly never expressed clearly or correctly in the public sphere. Public schools and other populist educations have all buried the truth for generations. Joe Biden and so many others will go on national television and demand that we all accept their lie that “America was founded as an idea, a grand experiment.” Pardon my Yankee-speak, but that’s a load of BS.
In just the last few months, a phrase has started going around in discussions, a phrase that is finally opening up people’s understandings. Correct thinkers embrace it; Marxist thinkers call it racist. It’s the phrase “Heritage Americans.” It’s become a lightning rod because it cuts to the heart of the problem plaguing our country right now. Are some citizens more American than others? Do some citizens have more right to a voice or to be here than others? Is there even an objective standard of what it means to be American? Or is American nothing more than a legal label? Heck, the Marxists take it even further and have declared that American is an identity that belongs to everyone in the Western Hemisphere.
The answer to most of these questions is a demonstrably Yes (and no to the obvious one). Yes Virginia, there really are Heritage Americans. And funny enough, the “most American” Americans just happen to be Olde Virginians. Wink-wink.
“We Southerners are in one important way, unlike most stateless peoples. We are more American than those who call themselves Americans who now rule us. We are the original Americans, the true Americans, so we may say that Americans have no power in what is now the empire called ‘American.’” ~ Professor Clyde N. Wilson
Not only is Heritage American a real concept with real purpose in the current discussions, but this essay will explain why Heritage American is still not the full picture.
Let me start by laying out a radical claim: The Indians are not Native Americans. They can’t be. Because America did not exist in their past and was never a part of their culture or people. America was founded/created in 1607 when the first Englishmen established the first permanent English settlement in the New World (in a colony they named, Virginia!) America is not a landmass. America is not the soil. America is not the New World (I’ll talk more about the distinction between America and The Americas later). Nor is America an idea or collection of ideas. It’s not a political system or a grand experiment. And it’s certainly not a “Melting Pot.” America did not exist in 1500 AD, and it was not brought into existence by the Declaration of Independence, 1776. America is people, a People. A Nation. A people descended in every way from England and Anglo-Saxon stock. If some great horror were to wipe out every American with any ancestry going back to England, America would cease to exist. It cannot be replaced with Africans, Latins, Orientals, Muslims or even Germans or Irish. America is a nation that grew out of the English Colonies, like cuttings taken from a plant and transplanted into new soil.
Before one can understand what the American nation is, they first need to understand what a nation is in the first place. Surprisingly few people in America today use the term Nation correctly or can even define it when pushed. Most make the mistake of conflating the word nation with Country or State.
State is another term that most Americans have a deeply confused definition of – but that’s no accident. We have been trained to think of the “states” – i.e. Virginia, New York, Colorado – as nothing more than sub-units of the country. In Canada they have Provinces. In France, Departments. England has counties. We use states – no big deal, right? Wrong. This is a point that Confederates have a distinct leg up on, as we still revere our home States as our Mother Countries.
Our “sub-units” are called states now because they were called states when this whole mess was started. And again, that wasn’t just by random chance or a matter of preference. We were a union of STATES – emphasis on plural. The United States was not a singular entity but a collection of entities. This distinction was erased de facto by Lincoln and his victory over the Constitution in the War of Northern Aggression. This term matters because it underscored what sort of government we were supposed to have. A “state” is a distinct political unit – which can also be called a Polity. Virginia in 1785 was a state, not subordinate to any other governing apparatus. It remained its own state -- its own polity -- when it joined the voluntary Union of other states. It agreed to lay down some of its powers – such as dealing with foreign countries – in order to join. But it retained the right to be independent once again in the future. To secede if need be – which it did in 1861.
But if a state is a political structure, then what is a nation? The word nation is a translation of the Greek word Ethnos – which is literally where we get the word ethnicity from. A nation is a body of people united through blood, language, history and culture. In ancient history, the Greeks were one nation, but lived in dozens of independent polities called City-States – literally a state (political structure) anchored on a single city. During the events of “The 300” and the Battle of Thermopylae, 
the City-State of Sparta felt a degree of loyalty to their fellow Greek nationals, just enough loyalty to motivate them to march to war against the invading Persians. But even at that time, many Greek cities full of Greek Nationals on the west coast of Anatolia (Asia Minor, or modern-day Turkey) were already under Persian control and part of the Persian state. Yet, the Greeks of Athens, Thebes and Sparta were not bothered very much by this. Certainly not enough to fight to liberate them. The Greek Nation was stretched across dozens of States and even completely foreign rulers.
And then there is the term Country, which is a little harder to pin down. But England can provide some nice clear-cut examples of how all three concepts can exist at once. Currently, there is the state known as the United Kingdom. The UK consists of two Countries, England and Scotland – plus Northern Ireland. And the country of England consists of the English (Anglo-Saxon) Nation, the Welsh Nation, the Cornish Nation and even the Manx Nation. These Celtic peoples have been so long incorporated into the country of England it’s nearly impossible to envision them separately. Yet they do remain distinct Nations – “peoples united by blood, history, language and culture.” If we go to the other end of English history, we can see the country of England during the 6th and 7th century AD divided up between roughly seven kingdoms (states) and the Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Romano-Briton nations (ethnicities).
With all those terms defined, we can turn to the question: just what is America? And what is an American? To utilize our terms, America is a country for sure. The United States is the government that runs the country of America – it’s the State. And the country of America contains many nations – but to make it more complicated, only one of those can be rightly called THE American nation. The true American Nation. But are members of this “American nation” the fabled Heritage Americans?
Heritage American is a term that I quite like, but as prefaced in the opening, it’s far from the whole story. And its use in the current political discussion is once again missing the point. The question should not be, does America belong to Heritage Americans? But rather, are Heritage Americans the true Americans?
As I said, the Indians (Cherokee, Iroquois, Sioux, Apache, etc) are not Native Americans or true Americans -- because what they were Native to wasn’t America. America has a starting point and it’s not when God created the earth. And it’s not when the ancestors of the Indians and Eskimos crossed over from Siberia. Nor was America created in 1776 or 1788 – that was the creation of the United States of America, which if you followed my earlier digression, is an altogether different concept. America wasn’t started in 1492 by Columbus, or when St. Augustine was founded in the future state of Florida. No, America was created in 1607 by the English colonists who landed at Jamestown. Christopher Newport or Sir Walter Raleigh could both be argued to be the father of America. (The Lost Colony of Roanoke, founded by Raleigh, would have been the start of America had it survived.)
From the incredible 1607 Project:
America wasn't founded on an idea. America wasn't founded on slavery or by slaves. And America wasn't founded as a city upon a hill. America, the real tangible America, was born in Virginia. And that's the America we should emulate. So much of what we think about America comes from Virginia. These early Virginians founded the first elected assembly in 1619. They established civil liberties in the name of the rights of Englishmen. Virginia is the key to understanding what America is and what America was.
This is the birth of the American Nation, a nation that would eventually grow to be a whole country called America. Of course, the terms only get more confusing because we use “America” for almost everything over here – a fact that the Marxists have been exploiting to try to undermine actual American identity. So once again, let’s define our terms: America vs The Americas.
Christopher Columbus discovered the New World (and I will fight you to the death on that, but that’s for a different essay), otherwise known as The Americas. Not America, Americas. The Americas consist of the continents of North America and South America, and the region known as Central America. But at no point anywhere else has any other country or nation borne the name of America or American. We are not the United States of the Americas. Our country grew out of the American Nation which was in turn an offshoot of the English Nation. This is like a sapling cut from a healthy tree and transplanted into new soil. Or, rather, 13 cuttings each placed in a unique plot of dirt that became the 13 Original Colonies. (Albion’s Seed is a truly excellent source that further groups these “saplings” into four distinct regions that became the South, New England, the Middle Colonies and Appalachia.)
Now, if one accepts that there is a real American nation – a people united in blood, history, culture and language – then one must accept a new and radical term – one that is guaranteed to get you labeled a racist just for repeating it:
Ethnic Americans.
Yes, white people do actually have a right to claim to be ethnic. It’s not just for BIPOCs.
And there is a real American Ethnicity.
And no matter how much our enemies howl and scream about racism, it’s a White Ethnicity.
Ethnic American is not hard to define. An Ethnic American is descended of Englishmen. They are white, they speak English and they practice a social order grounded in Protestant Christianity. These are Americans with strong blood and cultural ties back to the English settlers who created the 13 original colonies. This is a true blood nation. No, this is not a call for a “blood purity” standard. National identity has never in any context been based on purity, but rather common sense. One’s national identity is what they “most are.” Not the “1% of your DNA” that so many today are obsessed with finding.
The issue that arises with the current use of Heritage Americans is that it is subsuming Ethnic Americans when in fact the two groups are often very different.
While controversial to say today, it is indisputable that the foundations of America, and the United States government America would later create, were English in origin. Germans were present in small numbers, but their cultural influence rarely extended beyond their own communities. There were very small numbers of Dutch and Swedes left over in their respective colonies, but the same is also true of their influence – it was so small as be non-existent. The 1700s saw a huge surge in Scots-Irish and Highlander immigration, but these “uncouth barbarians” were quickly shuffled off to the frontier where they would establish a strong, regional identity as Appalachians (Again, see Albion’s Seed). Of course, black slaves were here by the creation of the Constitution, but their influence was limited to small cultural flavors. (While many are quick to point out the French influence in Louisiana and Spanish influence in Florida, neither of these colonies were part of America during the formative years. Their addition later on did nothing to alter the foundation of American society.)
This Ethnic American people was well established by the Revolutionary War – in fact, there’s good reason to believe that it was the emergence of such a strong, clear, independent identity that ultimately drove the War for Independence. They had become distinct from the home-English strain. Sadly, most Ethnic Americans today have been conditioned to put this identity aside as nothing more than a curiosity. We are taught that it is “Racist” to be proud of this ethnic identity or to even acknowledge its existence. Instead, most Ethnic Americans choose to identify themselves with the second type of American to arise chronologically: Heritage Americans.
The term Heritage American is best used for the second identity to take shape – which is more or less in line with the way most folks are using it in the current discussion. The main distinction from the current popular discussion is to separate the original Ethnic Americans from those migrants who came later. The movie Gangs of New York very usefully lays out this separation. The Nativists led by Bill the Butcher are distinctively separated from the recent Irish migrant wave, despite both feeling “like normal Americans” to modern audiences.
The Heritage American identity is an adopted identity, not based in ethnic inheritance. Its members largely view America as having been born in 1776, clarified in the Civil War, reached its glorious purpose in WWII, and assumed its throne as king of the world in the Cold War. These could also be called Lincoln Americans, as they fully embrace Lincoln's lie that “87 years prior, a new nation was brought forth on this continent." Even most Southerners these days tend to believe that Lincoln “fought to save the union, and that it was a good thing he won.” Their identity is the Heritage of American greatness passed down. They pay little regard to the nearly two centuries of American development that preceded the Revolution. They will lean heavily on the stories of the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere and Valley Forge, but know almost nothing about the developmental years of 1610-1740.
Heritage Americans include most Ethnic Americans – having been generally convinced to surrender their true ethnic identity -- and those massive non-English immigration waves of the 19th and early 20th century -- to include the Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews, Dutch and Scandinavians. And of course, the freed slaves. This American identity is marked by loyalty to the U.S. Government and the U.S. flag, pride in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, a general embrace of the English language and participation in a generic Pan-American culture. While they maintain a tie back to their home nations, these Heritage Americans have left most of that culture behind.
World War II largely bookended this identity. It was such a defining event of national pride that even the wounds leftover from the War of Northern Aggression were healed. Case in point, the City of Vicksburg ended its boycott of the celebration of Independence Day (the day the city fell to Grant) after WWII. Basking in the glorious Allied victory, most Southerners were willing to give up the identity of a conquered nation and accept their role as a regional variation in the greater American nation – singular.
These Heritage Americans played a significant role in the building of America’s great industries and our economic and international greatness. But they played no role in laying down the foundation of American identity. Their contributions and alterations to the U.S. Constitution have largely run counter to historic English principles.
Ethnic and Heritage Americans stand in direct distinction from the latter two types of Americans that can be identified: Civic and Conceptual.
The third American identity to arise chronologically is the Civic American, or Paper American. These Americans are people who came here in huge numbers during the Cold War. Their claim to being American is entirely grounded in the approval of the U.S. government and their adherence to the Civic Virtues as espoused by the U.S. government – such as Capitalism, Freedom of Speech and Religion, anti-Communism, and a strong work ethic. This is an earned identity, without any basis in inheritance or right. One works hard, impresses the U.S. government, jumps through their hoops and presto -- you are stamped an American. These people generally made a sincere effort to act American and to learn English and the highlights of American history. But it's only studying for a test. It's not part of the fiber of who they are. They are Americans only on Paper.
Religion across these three categories is an excellent way to showcase their vast differences. Ethnic Americans were largely Protestant Christian with a small smattering of Catholics. Heritage Americans almost universally came from Christian nations, though they were frequently Catholic or Orthodox. (The Marxists that came over after the failed Revolutions of 1848 would be a notable exception). But up through World War II, the vast majority of Americans of any stripe nominally practiced some form of Christianity. This would all change with the creation of the Civic category of Americans. While being Anti-Communist largely meant that immigrants to the US during the Cold War still attested to some sort of religious faith, they were rarely Christian. Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and pagans of every flavor poured into the country. And since Lincoln’s America had so thoroughly bought into the lie that the First Amendment protected non-Christian religious sects, hyper-tolerance of non-Christian religions became an essential American Virtue.
The final and most recent type of American is one that can be tentatively called a Conceptual American. These are the people who think they are entitled to come here, entitled to the identity without any work or accommodations. Anyone and everyone is or could be an American. This includes the attempt to say that everyone born in the West (The Americas) is an American. Under this conception, “Americans” can speak any language, practice any culture, hold to any heritage or history. America is nothing more than a concept to be applied willy-nilly. Supporters of this are found claiming that recently arrived refugees from Afghanistan “are more American than you” because these refugees are grateful. Or because they aided the U.S. government in the war. This entire category is the fruit of the infiltration of Cultural Marxism into the United States over the last 75 years or so. Its inclusion here should not be seen as any sort of validation of their presence or claimed identity.
Conceptual Americans have largely arrived here since the 1980s. They demand the right to maintain their own culture and their own language. They reject any baseline criteria for what an American should be. They insist that the values of their home nation be included as true American values. They expect and demand that the United States celebrate their culture and their holidays as if they were part and parcel of American culture. They deconstruct the American identity to be nothing more than a presence in the United States. For Conceptual Americans, the America they want was created by the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s. Everything before that is just “racist white people stuff” that doesn’t matter. Not too many years ago, the LA Times dismissed the importance of events like the Boston Tea Party to American history, as “Latin Americans” had no part in it. For them, that history – our history – literally belongs to a different people, to “Colonizers.” They are of course correct, that history doesn’t belong to them. But the “different people” they dismiss are the true, Ethnic Americans.
To put this in a different context, imagine a future where white Southern Baptists have become so persecuted in the U.S. that they start to emigrate in mass numbers. Of all the places on earth, they chose Thailand. Soon 50,000 Southern Baptists are living in Bangkok. The first ones who came went through the process to become legal citizens – they learned to speak Thai as best they could and adapted to the culture. They adopted local clothing and cuisine. But as their numbers grew, they started demanding that the Thai government adapt to them. They want streets named for American presidents and generals. They cry racism if the Thai government doesn’t celebrate Lee-Jackson Day and the 4th of July. They demand that all street signs and government documents be written in both Thai and English. This is of course absurd. Even if such a body of Americans did flee to Thailand, they would not be seen as true Thai – not ever. No matter how many years they lived there. Their children’s children’s children wouldn’t be considered Thai – unless they tried to assimilate by only marrying and reproducing with native Thai. This standard seems obvious and the globalists gleefully defend it – for non-white countries. But once one rejects the lies that “America is an idea,” “America is a nation of immigrants,” or even that “America is a Melting Pot” it’s easy to see how this standard should also be applied to the U.S.
To use a line from a recent movie, “So you’re American. What kind of American are you?” What is it to be American? Ethnic Americans are the real Americans. We are right now a people without a government of our own, living under the rule of foreign invaders. Heritage Americans are certainly more American than Paper Americans, but most of their identity is tied up in the lies of Lincoln and the U.S. government. They so often lack a true appreciation for where America came from. But, I do want to emphasize that there are always exceptions. These categories are by their very nature broad. There are plenty of Heritage bloodlines that have married into Ethnic bloodlines, giving their descendants a claim to both. There are Civic Americans who have arrived in the South and become the biggest defenders of the Confederate legacy – this is proper assimilation. There are Copperheads in every state who have shaken off the lies of Lincoln and his ilk. There is no inherent insult in being placed in any one of these categories unless one chooses to see insult. It is not an insult to tell a man he’s a man and not a woman, no matter how much he may scream and rage against the truth. But it is important for one to recalibrate how they view things. Heritage and Civic Americans need to accept that they may never fully understand what it means to be a true Ethnic American. They may never understand why the War of Northern Aggression and our brave Confederate heroes still mean so much to the South. If they do, that’s wonderful. But if they fail to grasp its significance, their obligation is to accept that they “don’t get it.” Not to lecture us about letting go of it as unimportant. Their obligation is to support the native and not try to supplant them. To do otherwise is to make themselves an enemy. Civic Americans especially need to realize and accept that they have a long ways to go to become proper Americans, a task that will likely require generations of assimilation to fully achieve. I recently joked with a Copperhead friend that he couldn’t be a true Virginian until “he let Robert E. Lee into his heart.” This is far closer to true than not.
In closing, I’m reminded of an infamous scene at the end of the “Civil War.” General Richard Taylor, the great Confederate commander in the West, had surrendered and was dining with his Union captors. One of the general officers at the table was Major General Peter Joseph Osterhaus, a German Marxist who had fled Europe after the failed revolution of 1848.
In his heavy German accent, he proceeded to lecture General Taylor – the son of President Zachary Taylor – that now the “South would learn what America really was.” The true Americans around the table looked away with shame in their eyes as this foreigner, barely assimilated into American culture, dared to lecture a true ethnic American and a son of a noble bloodline, about what “real Americans looked like.” I hear these same exact sentiments – and often the same exact words – gushing forth from foreigners everywhere I look today. Politicians with accents so think they are barely intelligible go on and on about how folks like me “don’t know what’s really American.”
General Taylor’s perfect response, dripping in sarcasm, is recorded in his book Destruction and Reconstruction:
“I apologized meekly for my ignorance, on the ground that my ancestors had come from England to Virginia in 1608, and, in the short intervening period of two hundred and fifty-odd years, had found no time to transmit to me correct ideas of the duties of American citizenship. Moreover, my grandfather, commanding the 9th Virginia regiment in our Revolutionary army, had assisted in the defeat and capture of the Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, and I lamented that he had not, by association with these worthies, enlightened his understanding. My friend smiled blandly, and assured me of his willingness to instruct me. Happily for the world, since the days of Huss and Luther, neither tyranny nor taste can repress the Teutonic intellect in search of truth or exposure of error. A kindly, worthy people, the Germans, but wearing on occasions.”
These days it is very popular to compare the United States to the Roman Empire, especially in an attempt to predict how the American Empire will follow Rome’s path towards collapse and destruction. I confess, I fall victim to this trend myself. Roman Identity provides a very good apples-to-apples example for us to compare. At the heart of the Roman Empire were the Latins, true Romans. They spoke fluent (and complex) Latin, and enjoyed a robust culture. They expanded through military conquest, absorbing nearby peoples. These people were Romanized, but never fully Roman. Then came “the Barbarians.” Largely Germanic tribes who were envious of Rome’s prosperity. The first tribes to cross the border made valiant attempts to adopt the Roman culture and language, but never quite measured up. In the end, the Barbarian tribes flooded across the border and tore apart the mighty bastion that for so long defined civilization.
These “new Romans” would pick and choose what they wanted from Roman culture, and just as often forced the Romanized locals to adapt to their own German ways. Their presence was so transformative that most of these regions are still known to this day by the identity of the German invaders. The nation of the Gauls would eventually be known by the name of their conquerors, the Franks. The land of the Romano-Britons became “Anglo-Saxon Land” or England. Northern Italy is known to this day as Lombardy, after the Germanic Lombards.
For centuries, the German barbarians looked across the border to Rome and saw wealth, plenty, and sophistication. They wanted it for themselves. But they failed to understand that Roman Civilization was a complete model – it couldn’t be picked apart and still function. In the same way, the flood of migrants coming to America now want all of the benefits our culture has to offer, but without the foundational elements that lead to those benefits. The Romans failed to assimilate the Germans. Or inversely, the Germans failed to assimilate themselves. The contention between the distinct identities would eventually rip the country apart, like two metals improperly fused together.