Cumberland's Confederate history sure to fascinate

Published in Cumberland Times-News Monday, July 27, 2009.

Opposition to education about the Confederate flag is misguided. Knowledge about our Confederate heritage is important, in classrooms and the community.

The Confederate flag flew over Cumberland only once, when Union occupiers briefly retreated, but Southern sympathies ran deep.

Slavery was the states’ rights issue that led to the Civil War. A turning point was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. It permitted the South to expand slavery into new territories. The Republican Party formed in opposition and soon was the voice and force of the North.

Abraham Lincoln enunciated the North’s position on “slavery agitation” in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. Then between Lincoln’s November 1860 election and his March 1861 inauguration as president, seven states seceded. (Maryland planned to join them.) The following year, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Confederate activities in Cumberland and Maryland and oppression under Union occupation come home in The McKaig Journal.

Public interest surrounded the 1984 publication of this Civil War-era diary. Now just one generation past, the Journal is forgotten, and our Civil War heritage is maligned. Perhaps The McKaig Journal should be required reading in Allegany County schools.

Cumberland’s place in the Civil War is certain to fascinate any history teacher. Students might engage in thoughtful discussion about ancestors who could have been among the 800-or-so slaves in Allegany County, or who might have fought either with the North or South in the Battle between the States.

Published by the Allegany County Historical Society, with a grant from the 350th Maryland Birthday Committee, The McKaig Journal was penned between 1851 and 1866 by Priscilla Beall McKaig and her husband, Cumberland businessman William Wallace McKaig.

In the introduction, Michael Mudge recounts events that escalated, after the April 12, 1861 battle at Fort Sumter, to poise Maryland to secede in September. Leading the delegation in that direction (until his arrest by Union troops in Cumberland on August 26) was Mrs. McKaig’s brother-in-law, State Senator Thomas Jefferson McKaig.


President Lincoln squelched Maryland’s secession, because it endangered the federal capital. On September 11, he ordered all the legislators’ arrests.

Mudge elucidates President Lincoln’s decision to station up to 8,000 federal troops at Campobello (the site of Allegany High School) on June 8, 1861, and to put the entire state under martial law.

Mrs. McKaig, who had two sons Confederate officers and another a prisoner of war, was banished from town for three months. The “underground railroad” that passed through our countryside went above board, as slave catchers in Cumberland lost their jobs, and Negro house servants and farm workers fled freely to Pennsylvania.

Communications went underground, as “ladies whose hearts were with the South” operated a secret Confederate post office in the rear of a store on Baltimore Street. They also donated money and provisions to Confederate soldiers who were on their way to prison in Ohio.

Mudge mentions Constance Cary, who left Cumberland prior to the occupation to go to the estate of her grandmother, Lady Fairfax, in Alexandria. Her two cousins, who faced arrest in Baltimore, joined her there. The trio was popular in Richmond for singing “My Maryland,” which memorializes the first Confederate blood shed in the streets of Baltimore on April 19, 1861.

Mudge writes of the Cary cousins: “upon the (Confederate) War Department’s approval of the design by General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, these three Maryland belles completed the first three Confederate battle flags.” Beauregard was one of three Confederate generals to receive them.

While Allegany County filled Union ranks, as well, Mudge notes, its sympathies were Confederate. Let’s know and honor our heritage.

Faith transcends violence

Published in Cumberland Sunday Times, June 14, 2009.

"...peoples’ evil acts do not warrant condemnation of religion, nor
skepticism toward humankind."

An atheist views violence in the name of God as reason to reject faith (“There’s no compassion or pity in them,” May 6). A believer views all violence as godless.

Evil reigns in peoples’ minds and hearts when they commit heinous acts against innocents. But peoples’ evil acts do not warrant condemnation of religion, nor skepticism toward humankind.

Believers plumb the depths of their relationship with God to find the transcendent in the midst of godlessness. God’s love protects souls, and it changes minds and hearts to overcome evil. Our hope in God and in the goodness of humankind overcomes despair, and it moves mountains (Mt. 17:20).

Anne Frank was 15 when she died of typhus in a concentration camp, seven months after her arrest in 1944. She and her Jewish family, hunted by Nazi soldiers, hid for almost three years in her father’s office building in Amsterdam. An accidental noise in their upper chamber revealed their whereabouts to an incidental burglar and betrayer below.

Otto Frank survived (Nazis killed 6 million Jews and 8 million more civilians in three years). He returned to his family’s hideout and found his daughter’s diary. Published in English in 1952, Anne’s poignant words tell of her love for God and her unfailing faith in people.

Immaculee Ilibagiza was 22, a Catholic Tutsi college student, when the Hutu government set out to exterminate her tribe in a power grab in Rwanda in 1994. A family friend, a Hutu Christian pastor, risked his own life to hide her and seven other Tutsi women in a tiny concealed bathroom in his home.

For the duration of the holocaust, hunted by Hutu killers, Immaculee shared meager table scraps, prayed her rosary, read her Bible, kept a holy silence, and fortified her spirit. She and her sister prisoners were about to be betrayed by a houseboy when the pastor, who also survives (Hutus killed 1 million Tutsis, and moderate Hutus, in three months), made a bold move to transfer his captives to their French liberators.

Published in 2006, Immaculee’s story is vivid testimony to the power of faith. Her words to the man who killed her family, but couldn’t extinguish her God or her dreams, were, “I forgive you.”

Violence is man’s injustice against man. Genocide is mass-hysteria violence. The cure for violence is a change of mind and heart. It is found in God’s love for all human life and in our forgiveness and joy in living.

Modern-day holocausts rage in systematized abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Justified in the name of compassion, abortion conveniently kills a targeted segment of our population. Promoted in the name of humanitarianism, embryonic stem cell research creates and enslaves nascent life with the sole intent to experiment with it and casually destroy it. Children these days are holocaust survivors.

Who tells the story of God’s mercy for good people gone mad in today’s holocaust? Norma McCorvey speaks in two books about the industry that appalls her and her own conversion rooted in God’s love. Locked for 20 years in her identity as Jane Roe, McCorvey now runs her own pro-life ministry.

Her 1973 Supreme Court case legalized abortion in all 50 states. Ironically, Jane Roe never had an abortion. She gave birth to the child in question and to two more. In 1995, McCorvey became a pro-life Christian. In 1998, she became Catholic.

Fifty-one percent of Americans now are pro-life. Let’s keep faith in God’s mercy, and hope that His love will reform minds and hearts and move them to bring the genocide of innocents to a peaceful end.

Christian thinking fundamental to forming Constitution

"Davis proposes a monument to secularism, in opposition to the
Judeo-Christian principles that are displayed on the Ten Commandments monument -- which he has said publicly he would prefer to see removed from the courthouse lawn."

Glenn Riffey (“Constitution a product of Christian influence,” April 14) presents an informed argument for honoring Christian influence in the construction of the U.S. Constitution, in response to Jeffrey Davis (“Why shouldn’t we honor the Constitution,” April 8).

Surely, your savvy readers appreciate historical facts; and they desire to understand the reality of Christianity’s essence and the impact of the Judeo-Christian experience in our forebears’ formation of the Constitution; and they believe in the Constitution’s purpose to protect and guide a civil society.

We may add to Mr. Riffey’s list of founding fathers John Witherspoon, the only active clergyman and college president (College of New Jersey, now Princeton University) to help form the Declaration of Independence and to sign it.

A native of Scotland and a minister of the national Presbyterian Church, Witherspoon, like others involved in forming our nation, was wary of the power of the British crown.

In 1774, Witherspoon joined the American Revolution as a member of the Committee of Correspondence, which interpreted British actions among the colonies and disseminated information. This committee brought the colonies into political union, and many of its members were daring Sons of Liberty.

In June 1776, Witherspoon was elected to the Continental Congress as a member of the New Jersey delegation. He became one of the Congress’s most influential members, serving on more than 100 committees, among them the board of war and the committee on secret correspondence.

Witherspoon helped draft the Articles of Confederation, and he argued to adopt the Constitution during the New Jersey ratification debates. (Source: Wikipedia.)

Presbyterian pastor and evangelical Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer writes in his 1981 book, A Christian Manifesto, that the “linkage of (Witherspoon’s) Christian thinking and the concepts of government were not incidental but fundamental” to form and establish the American civil society.

Now, what is disconcerting about Jeffrey Davis’ indignation in pressuring the county to put up a monument to the Constitution is that what he really wants is not a monument to the Constitution at all.

Davis proposes a monument to secularism, in opposition to the Judeo-Christian principles that are displayed on the Ten Commandments monument -- which he has said publicly he would prefer to see removed from the courthouse lawn. In fact, Davis has had limited success in attempts to do just that.

Davis wants a monument to his viewpoint, which he believes is the only one possible. This attitude misses the mark.

“The meaning conveyed by a monument is generally not a simple one like ‘Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner,’” writes Justice Samuel Alito in the unanimous Supreme Court opinion in Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum.

“Even when a monument features the written word,” writes Justice Alito, “the monument…may in fact be interpreted by different observers, in a variety of ways.”

A monument is a sort of fine art object. It inspires us and brings us to pause and reflect, in a personal and communal way, on matters that have individual and social significance.

A monument to the Constitution, especially if it includes words, should represent the Constitution, not Jeffrey Davis.

We should see, on a monument to the Constitution, the Preamble, which sums up the Constitution’s reason for being. Then let us pray that the document, so carefully crafted by our courageous and faithful forefathers, remains up to the task to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” for all.

by Nancy E. Thoerig 05.13.09

Notre Dame scandal: Obama not role model for Catholics

Emailed April 6 to Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., president at University of Notre Dame. (Confirmation reply received April 16.) To date, 24 bishops have voiced opposition.

"Rather than honor this president and condone his life-denigrating
policies, we Catholics should stand firmly in opposition and call him to task on his ethical transgressions."

Dear Father Jenkins,

Please rescind the invitation that has been accepted by President Obama to speak at commencement on May 17, and reverse the university's intent to confer on him the honorary doctor of laws degree.

Called the "abortion president" by pro-life activists, Mr. Obama’s appearance at the university would contradict the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ policy against honoring pro-abortion politicians. In 2004, the USCCB approved a policy statement regarding "Catholics in Political Life," which states, with reference to pro-abortion politicians, "They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions."

It is an insult to all Catholics; and it would be a lasting disgrace for Notre Dame, as one of our country's leading Catholic universities, and an unwanted complicity for Catholics of conscience everywhere, to have a legacy of hosting and commiserating with this president, who in the first months of his term has done unprecedented moral damage to implicate all taxpayers in funding abortions at home and abroad.

Additionally, this president has supported abortionists’ leaving viable babies – survivors of botched abortion procedures -- to die, thereby compromising the life-protecting and preserving oaths of health care workers in our nation’s hospitals.

Now the Obama administration intends to rescind health service regulations that would result in health care workers being forced to provide such services as abortions in violation of their beliefs and consciences. USCCB President Cardinal Francis George states: "No government should come between an individual person and God—that’s what America is supposed to be about.” Indeed, Mr. Obama’s proposed rescission of these protective regulations amounts to government oppression and threatens the inalienable rights to freedom of religion and conscience and speech that are protected under the First Amendment.

Furthermore, Mr. Obama has promised to sign into law the Freedom of Choice Act, which further would violate and suppress constitutional rights to exercise freedoms of religion, conscience, and speech, and would enforce the taxpayer-funded genocide of unborn infants in America. As a result, Catholic practitioners of conscience could lose their livelihoods, and Catholic health facilities would close. The light of our society’s strongest bastion of reason – the Catholic Church -- would be extinguished, and its voice would be strangulated, in a legalized culture of death in America.

Mr. Obama’s embryonic stem cell research policies, as well -- unnecessary in the light of advances made in adult stem cell research -- are contrary to a respect for the dignity of created life, and they fly in the face of every conscionable Catholic.

Catholic teachings state that “the measure of every institution is whether it threatens or enhances the life and dignity of the human person” (USCCB “Themes of Catholic Social Teaching,” 2005). Mr. Obama’s policies regarding abortion, conscientious objection, and stem cell research threaten the life and dignity of the human person. Rather than honor this president and condone his life-denigrating policies, we Catholics should stand firmly in opposition and call him to task on his ethical transgressions.

Please don't support or honor this president and his problematic policies. He is not a model to raise up before your students, or before Catholics anywhere, to admire or to emulate. Only further harm to our nation’s damaged moral fabric, and to our historic Catholic values, ideals, and identity would come of it.

Please rescind the invitation. Please reverse the decision.

Many prayers for you, your students, and for our country,

Nancy E. Thoerig and Mary W. Thoerig
Mount Savage, MD 21545

cc: Patrick McCartan (fellow and board chairman emeritas), Cardinal Francis George (USCCB president), Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien (Baltimore)
mailed copies to: Bishop John M. D'Arcy (Fort Wayne-South Bend), Richard C. Notebaert (board chairman)

Constitution a product of Christian influence

Written by Glenn C. Riffey, Cumbelrand, Maryland, and published in Cumberland Times-News Letters April 14, 2009.

To the Editor:

In his letter of “Why shouldn’t we honor the Constitution?” (April 8 Times-News) Mr. Jeffrey Davis makes the comment that the Constitution is truly a secular document.

If he means that it was written without any Christian influence, I totally disagree. Here is why.

During the Constitutional Convention, when things were becoming quite tense, Benjamin Franklin not only called for prayer but stated that “he could hardly conceive a transaction of such momentous importance — referring to the Constitution — to pass without being in some degree influenced, guided and governed by that omnipotent, omnipresent and beneficent Ruler, in whom all inferior spirits live and move and have their being.”

Now, Dr. Franklin was no Christian but he was highly influenced by the British evangelist, George Whitefield, and was a close friend of his.

In addition, convention President George Washington stated, “This event is in the hands of God.” He went on to say, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution and fourth president of the United States stated in the Federalist Papers no. 43 that the authority for ratification of the Constitution by nine states under Article VII of the document was the same “laws of Nature and Nature’s God” to which Thomas Jefferson, our third president, had appealed for our right to exist as a nation in the Declaration of Independence.

In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote that liberty was a gift of God and an “unalienable right” to be secured by government. In the Constitution the preamble states that one of the purposes of the government is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Prosperity [sic]" (should be "posterity").

According to Washington, one of those liberties was the right to worship God.

Last, but not least, John Adams, our second president succeeding Washington said this, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In other words, Adams knew that unless we kept moral and religious principles that the Constitution would not work.

During these times Christianity was a daily living way of life, and even non-Christians were greatly influenced by Christian principles. Without the guidance of God and Christian influence in the midst of this convention the Constitution would not be the document that it is.

he Constitution of the United States may not be a Christian church document, but it was by Christian reason and influence that gave way for the liberties that it gives, even to the point of one wanting to deny any Christian influence upon the document at all.

This same Christian influence is what gives Mr. Davis the right to say that it is only a secular document and for that he should give thanks to God for the ability to do so.

Glenn C. Riffey
Cumberland