The Fremantle Diary

The Reviews

In a book that was “retired” from the public library, I have added another gem to my collection.  This handsome hardcover was purchased for eight dollars from a used bookseller who listed it as “an ex-library book.”

It did not take two sentences from the horse’s mouth to see why his page-turner might be a little suppressed.  Since truth today is no defence in courtrooms and presently outlawed in Canada, Australia and Europe, I can see why a book like this would threaten an already shaky house of cards.

Upon coming to my hands, I noticed it was in almost new condition.  This book must have been “retired” from the library for some time, as it has no bar code.  Today’s technologies scan books into databases by their bar codes.  This one bears a pristine manila pocket on the inside cover that would have contained the outdated checkout card.

So-called “editor” Walter Lord published this edition in 1954’s New York.  He wrote a four-page introduction and 53 pages of sardonic endnotes that are characteristic of ADL’s calumniators.  In his ocean of smears, Mr. Lord dive-bombs the author’s text with desperate refutations and anti-speak typical of ADL staff writers.  The modus operandi of Lord’s voluminous attack follows the suit of an almost identical writer who snapped at the heels of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf fifteen years earlier.

Walter Lord’s footnotes methodically deconstruct, malign, defame, mock and jab at the author’s text.  Chapter-by-chapter.  Blow-by-blow.  Lord strikes below the belt from every angle in cheap shots given to the father of lies.  Lord’s work is signature.  Timeless.  And bears the stamp of a jerk I wish I didn’t know so well.

Now – let me review a first-hand account of the American Civil War by Queen Victoria’s Coldstream Guard, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Fremantle.

In 1863 Fremantle left England for the Confederate States of America.  He was on a commission to “see what was really going on over there.”  As the Northern States were being none too forthcoming with Britannia about the cotton blockade.

 

 

During his three-month odyssey through the Confederacy, Fremantle was to keep a diary.  And so he has done.  The Fremantle Diary is an eloquent whirlwind.  A first person account from a third party observer that flies in the face of so-called American History.

Fremantle’s Diary is so jam-packed with high adventure that there is no room for embellishment.  The truth juts up from his pages like javelins of blazing light.  Everything he wrote was right.  From testimonies of Confederate officers with whom he shared a tent to those of fellow passengers on trains and stagecoaches – Fremantle enlightens us.  He even transposed letters and news clippings to add credence to what he wrote – not that he needed to.

The ADL-esque slurs of the book’s unconvincing editor only add fuel to the fire of the author’s chronicle.  Desperate digs of Walter Lord lay more brick to a steady foundation.

On the ship’s cutter Fremantle crossed the sandbar into the mouth of Rio Grande on 2 April 1863.  “We passed in like a flash of lightning,” he wrote.

Here come the Texas Rangers.  Big hats, big pistols, big saddles.  Welcome to Brownsville.  A place where a man’s six-shooter keeps other men honest, courteous and introspective.  Fremantle notes how Texans were beautiful riders but could not sit an English saddle nor jump a fence.  Blimey.

At 28 years of age, Fremantle was in good form for all the trials and traverse that awaited him.  Precarious trains, crowded stagecoaches, horses on loan, skiffs, yawls and steamboats.  Sometimes he even had to “foot it.”

It must be noted that throughout the text runs a fat stream of testimony about how Southern planters were both loved and respected by their African charges.  The so-called “slavery” of the South was no such thing according to Fremantle’s observations.  What he points out early in the text and by way of comparison, is how Northerners were hateful toward black people.

Fremantle’s Texas mule-driver, Mr. Sargent, was described thusly, “… a Northerner by birth, and is without any of the kind feeling which is nearly always felt by Southerners for Negroes.”  Fremantle notes how black people paraded through the streets on Sundays in finery surpassing that of their mistresses and masters.  And drove to church in their master’s buggies.  He said that sometimes from the back you couldn’t tell a slave from her mistress when they were walking down the street – so finely were black women attired.  And so belovedly.

According to Fremantle, The Golden Rule was observed by a Christian Confederacy to the extent that separation of race allowed.  Christian planters were kindly and caring to the black people in their charge.  Fremantle notes how he was taken with alacrity to slave quarters and introduced to all within.  He wrote how those advanced in years were cared for and seen to, given every comfort.  Hardly the case with Obama-care today (black or white).

Fremantle wrote that the reason “freeing the slaves” was balked at in the Confederacy is because of what happened in Jamaica when the British turned the island over to new freedmen.

The South lamented the institution of slavery in that no man should be another man’s slave.  Yet they also lamented the dilemma of what apparently happens to Africans outside of Godly government.  If anyone doubts the premise, examine the hinterlands of Haiti or Jamaica any time.  Throw in sub-Saharan Africa.  Currently in the USA, prison populations, our welfare state, urban slums, rampant crime and recent cannibalism in Miami speak for themselves.    (http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/02/2829962/nude-face-eating-cannibal-must.html)  Perhaps the Confederate planters saw into the future.

Onward Fremantle journeyed.  Hauling a skiff behind him, chest-deep in Louisiana bayou.  As the gators watched.  Onward still, through war-torn Mississippi.  To hear the cries of a noble people:  “State’s Rights!  Federal tyranny!”  The Lincolnites burned down what they couldn’t carry away.  Demoralize the enemy was the order of the day.

The only reason they didn’t burn down John and Carrie McGavock’s Carnton is because it was declared a field hospital for the Confederates during the Battle of Franklin.  Fremantle by that time had returned to England.  But he watched the entire fray of Gettysburg.  And recorded everything he saw from the fork of a tree.  Nothing like the movie.  Are you surprised?

An invitation to the good Colonel that reads:  “Will Colonel Fremantle sleep tonight at the house of a blockaded Rebel?”  — “Delighted.”

“After supper, the ladies played and sang.”

Fremantle’s list of Confederate West Pointers is long.  The highbrow South wanted for no leadership.  Catholic bishops and their fighting Irish were no shortage in the ranks either.   Many clergymen took off the cassock and put on the sword.  Topping the list was General Leonidas Polk, Bishop of Louisiana.  He described his situation in this way:  Once a man discovers that his house is on fire, he drops what he’s doing and puts the fire out.  Then he gets back to the business of every day life.  In Polk’s case, the Church.

In June 1863, The Army of Tennessee was camped along the Duck River for an 80-mile stretch.  Their generals broke bread at Mrs. Andrew Erwin’s house amid some 20,000 acres of verdant yield.  General Hardee was invited to make this mansion his headquarters.  Hence the Erwin parlours entertained much Confederate brass during Fremantle’s week at Shelbyville.  Here he described what he saw and did with great attention to detail.

A thoroughbred of a ride, that week.  I can see a ballroom bigger than most people’s houses.  I can see, through Fremantle’s eyes, the limpid azure of Patrick Cleburne’s as they talked over dinner.  I can see the fields.  The Basin.  That glorious, winding River.  The splendid review at Bell Buckle as the soldiers marched by.  Those devil-may-care boys with toothbrushes in their buttonholes.   In their Momma’s homespun grey.  Sometimes brown.  You can’t keep a good man down.

And a mansion on a hill – through Fremantle’s diary, I see it still.

Today at the site of Colonel Erwin’s torched mansion, one can listen to a short segment by tuning his radio to FM 90.1.  This corresponds to the roadside marker # 3G 42 (http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=25862)  in Wartrace, Tennessee.  Civil War history in this area has been falsified to my experience and strongly suppressed to everyone else’s.

Fremantle wrote his heart out in this diary.  Down to the foundry metal, he notes every shot and cannon.  And blows most of what we have been taught about the Civil War out of the water.  A reader shares the inner sanctum of Fremantle’s mind.  In it we find a scholar, a Christian gentleman and a Royal Army Officer who was held by the rigors of his honour.

The Fremantle Diary gives us the picture in Gone With the Wind Technicolor.  Perhaps it was under her belt, when convalescing journalist Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind.  Fremantle’s vivid details could have painted Mitchell a canvas for the setting of her novel.

In essence, what the evil forces of Fremantle’s time did via Tecumseh Sherman, they would later do in Russia.  Instead of an army riddled with impressed immigrants, Mister 9:11 destroyed Czarist Russia with a fomented mob of illiterate rabble.  And for much the same reason — to hide from future generations the splendour and righteousness of a Godly Government.  This has occurred in France and Cuba also.

The Old South fought the same foe who has been at war with us since the beginning of time.  If you need a finer point put on this “enemy within” than the one I have given you, consult text from the following sources:  Martin Luther, Arnold S. Leese, Henry Ford, Francis Parker Yockey, Jesus Christ, Andrew Carrington Hitchcock, Willis Carto, David Duke, George Lincoln Rockwell, George Patton, Gabriel of God (author of the Holy Qur’an), Adolf Hitler, Fr. Charles Coughlin,  Ingrid Rimland and her husband, Ernst Zundel.  There are, of course, more sources.  But those will get you started.

As for Arthur Fremantle, here’s to the Queen’s Finest — corroborating our heroic past.