Tucked away in the Arcadia Valley of the St. Francois Mountains of Missouri are the earthwork remains of Fort Davidson, the only testament to a long forgotten Civil War skirmish fought in late September of 1864 and known as the Battle of Pilot Knob. Outnumbered ten-to-one, the Union troops under the command of Brigadier General Thomas Ewing held off the superior “Army of Missouri” consisting of cavalry and mounted infantry and cannon that Confederate Major General Sterling Price had marshaled for the purpose of “liberating” his home state. Although Price and the Confederates won the battle, Ewing and his men managed to detonate their supplies with a slow-burning fuse to their powder magazine, escape in the darkness of night, and so severely diminish the size of Price’s advancing army and their available munitions that the Confederate’s ultimate objective, to seize St. Louis and control of Missouri, was lost for good.

Why do I tell this story? Because that fierce contest, like many others lost to our collective American memory, had the potential to rewrite history. After repeated military defeats in the summer of ’64, the Confederacy’s best chance of yet winning the war was to prevent Lincoln’s re-election. Had Ewing not managed to inflict such loss on the Confederates, or had Price just ignored the fort on his way to St. Louis, an otherwise certain surrender for the South could have been forestalled by so tormenting a war-weary North and publicly embarrassing President Lincoln that the 1864 election just weeks later turned for the Democratic Party’s General George McClellan and the Democrats’ promise to seek peace with the South after political victory. 

A campaign to embarrass Lincoln out of office. A promise from the Democrats that peace would return if they were given control of the country. A rag-tag collection of Union defenders trying to survive the steady bombardment from an army ten times their size just long enough to wear the enemy down. A military operation meant to prevent re-election of an American president. And 156 years later, history repeats. 

For all the Republicans suffering right now from Democratic Party-sanctioned violence and political intimidation behind Blue State lines, remember that your efforts, however small they might seem, are what keep the Blue army from advancing from New York and Minneapolis and Seattle into the total national occupation they have in mind. And while it is dispiriting to be outnumbered ten-to-one, those are the battles that often turn the tide of any conflict with meaning.

For America has always been the story of the underdog heavily surrounded. It was a minority of our colonial population that desired to free itself from the chains of the English empire. It was a minority of freedom-minded revolutionaries who collaborated to chart a risky and uncertain path for a new nation to be self-governed and forged in individual liberty. It was a minority of nineteenth-century Americans who rejected the prevailing political parties of the time so that Republican Party abolitionists could fight for those without a voice.

As difficult as it often is to be surrounded by an army of corporate news malefactors distorting the truth, social media censors depriving Americans of their speech, and Democratic Party prosecutors using their offices to support Antifa violence against innocent Americans, it is helpful to remember that there is nothing more American than being greatly outnumbered and left for certain defeat. Every statue the Democrats topple and monument they destroy today honors an American who at one time was surrounded, too. And we honor them, not because they ultimately prevailed, but because their moral certainty to persevere against terrible odds surpassed the natural impulse to fade away.

Just as the Democrats worked for the dissolution of the Union by struggling to prevent President Lincoln’s re-election, all the madness about us right now only seems overwhelming because the Democrats have put all of their remaining efforts in this war into defeating President Trump. Surely, if they truly believed they were on the “right side of history,” they wouldn’t feel compelled to use government-sanctioned violence, involuntary home confinement, and mass censorship to achieve their results.

The Democrats have given up on free speech and religious tolerance and private choice. They have forfeited Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Madison’s “ordered liberty.” They have decided to rid America of her history, so that Americans turn on each other by forgetting what binds them as one. They have decided to rid America of her police, so that chaos conquers freedom.

Who could look at this graveyard of ideas discarded so casually by the Democratic Party and not take heart, for all we must do is pick them up off the ground and make them wholly ours. The Democrats have already lost the battle of ideas, so long as we never lose resolve in our own. And just as with the generations before us, these are the ideas that a small minority can carry to victory, even when the powers of the day count them out. 

For Blue State Republicans now surrounded, for dispirited constitutionalists who think our end is near…fight on. The Democrats have put everything they have into this one presidential election, and if we deny them that victory, we can win this war.