Monthly Archives

January 2015

Blog

The Invasion Begins

By mid- January 1865, General Sherman’s campaign in South Carolina had begun in earnest. Some of his forces began moving through the parishes of Beaufort District at this time, and one of their first targets was the village of Hardeeville, where troops of the 20th Corps arrived on January 17th. During their days there, they burned down or tore apart…
Karen Stokes
January 30, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Origins of the Educational Nightmare

John Chodes, Destroying the Republic: Jabez Curry and the Re-Education of the Old South. New York: Algora Publishing. 332 pp. $29.95 (quality paperback) Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry of Alabama (1825–1903) was one of those fairly numerous 19th century Americans whose lives of astounding talent and energy put to shame the diminished leaders of the U.S. in the 21st century. Or…
Clyde Wilson
January 29, 2015
Review Posts

Andersonville From the Southern Side

This entry was originally published by The Society of Independent Southern Historians. The truth about Andersonville is not difficult to ascertain for anyone willing to search beyond the generally accepted story as perpetrated by the war’s victors, anxious to exculpate themselves for the guilt of the death of their countrymen who became prisoners. That story begins with a prison camp…
Becky Calcutt
January 28, 2015
Blog

The Art of Remembering

We gather here today to honor the memory of brave men who willingly faced the deadly fire of war in order to protect their kith and kin—their blood relatives, their friends and neighbors—they fought to protect their kith and kin from the horrors of the invader's torch and sword. General Robert E. Lee was one of the main leaders in…
James Ronald Kennedy
January 27, 2015
Blog

How The War Was About Slavery

In my capacity as editor of the Palmetto Partisan, I keep a very close eye on the news for articles regarding the Confederacy, especially as it relates to South Carolina, in the hope that our staff can use some of this information to produce timely and relevant content for our division journal. To do this I employ a news search…
Paul C. Graham
January 26, 2015
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Vindicating the South

Reprinted from Circa1865.com. The articles of Dr. Albert Taylor Bledsoe would often express “in vigorous language . . . the best types of literature of the conservative point of view” from the South. In battling against the inevitable tendencies of modernity changing the postwar South, he reminded Southerners that their civilization was one to cherish and perpetuate. Vindicating the South:…
Bernard Thuersam
January 23, 2015
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The Calamity of Appomattox

No American historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during…
H.L. Mencken
January 22, 2015
Blog

The Calamity of Appomattox

No American historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during…
H.L. Mencken
January 22, 2015
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Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson

This essay is part of the chapter "Southerners" in Brion McClanahan's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Real American Heroes. The Northern essayist and Republican partisan E.L. Godkin wrote following the death of “Stonewall” Jackson in 1863 that Jackson was “the most extraordinary phenomenon of this extraordinary war. Pure, honest, simple-minded, unselfish, and brave, his death is a loss to the…
Brion McClanahan
January 21, 2015
Review Posts

The Cause of Jackson and Lee

  Delivered at the Blount County Courthouse, January 19, 2015. Robert E. Lee said “Everyone should do all in his power to collect and disseminate the truth, in the hope that it may find a place in history and descend to posterity. History is not the relation of campaigns and battles and generals or other individuals, but that which shows…
Carl Jones
January 21, 2015
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The Martin Luther King Congressional Cover-Up: The Railroading of James Earl Ray

John Avery Emison, Martin Luther King Congressional Cover-Up, The: The Railroading of James Earl Ray. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 2014. The assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, has its various storylines that continue to this day. The recently disclosed 1964 FBI letter to King manifests the establishment’s disdain for King and its attempt to relegate…
Marshall DeRosa
January 20, 2015
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Robert E. Lee, Southern Heritage, Media Bias, and Al Sharpton

This piece originally appeared on the Canada Free Press. As you can probably surmise by my detailed caption, this article is a collection of random thoughts. It is typical at the beginning of a new year for people to reflect soberly on the state of events, and make optimistic resolutions and predictions for the future. Although I will try to…
Gail Jarvis
January 19, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Confederate Flag Day

I am honoured to be back in my native State (North Carolina) where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great. We are here on this occasion both to remember our Confederate forefathers and to honour them in their heroic War for Southern Independence. We do right to remember and honour our Confederate forebears, first of all because they…
Clyde Wilson
January 19, 2015
Blog

Travis Tritt Flies His Red Flag

Country music singer Travis Tritt recently tweeted a controversial comment in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. The tweet was in support of gun owners but at the same time took an implicit swipe at Muslims and the liberal media. The tweet has generated the predictable outrage, but also a lot of supportive replies. It is interesting that we…
Dan E. Phillips
January 16, 2015
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Robert E. Howard: Southern Writer

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When…
Mike C. Tuggle
January 15, 2015
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Let the South Ride Again on the Winds of Time

“There is a great story-telling tradition in the South. My grandfather, father, and uncles were all raconteurs, and I grew up listening to their stories, as well as those of other men. There's a touch of oral tradition in my writing.” – Robert Jordan The Abbeville Institute has done a remarkable job of restoring Southern gentlemen-authors to their rightful place…
James Rutledge Roesch
January 15, 2015
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Yankee Narrative vs. Southern Truth

To the chagrin and mortification of many liberals, Rolling Stone magazine had to apologize for its “lack of accuracy,” otherwise known as a lie, in a highly publicized article. In ‘A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,’ this left of center magazine first reported a total falsehood and for weeks defended their story. After…
Walter D. (Donnie) Kennedy
January 14, 2015
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Searching for Jefferson and Finding Ourselves

Why Historians Cannot Readily Situate Jefferson Finding Jefferson’s Shadow In his watershed work The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1961), Merrill D. Peterson argues that our task as Jeffersonian historians is in some sense Sisyphean. Aiming to situate Jefferson—to find the real Jefferson—we merely wind up with an image, a shad-ow, which is as obfuscatory as it is disconcerting.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 13, 2015
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The Battle of New Orleans

The Eighth of January was on everyone's tongue once, in similar fashion to the Fourth of July, for Andrew Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans occurred on this day in 1815, 200 years ago this very day. That there is almost no mention of this anniversary, that only a bare handful have any idea of the significance of…
William Cawthon
January 12, 2015
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Ten Things About Alabama You Might Not Know

I’m still a little chapped about that recent story from Chicago where it’s considered racist to listen to Lynyrd Skynrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” As a child growing up in Alabama, we were always made aware of our troubled past, but we preferred to focus on the positive aspects of our beloved home state as much as possible. Whenever one of…
Tom Daniel
January 9, 2015
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Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XIII

South Carolina will preserve its sovereignty, or be buried beneath its ruins.  --Governor Robert Y. Hayne, 1832 I have lived too long not to know how reluctantly the clearest proposition is admitted against preconceived opinions.   --Calhoun Justice is truth in action.   --Joubert The primary object of the criminal law is not to secure liberty or privilege, but to take them…
Clyde Wilson
January 8, 2015
Blog

The Cruel Winter of 1865 in South Carolina

January 2015 ushers in the last year of the sesquicentennial of the War for Southern Independence. One hundred and fifty years ago, the first month of 1865 was the beginning of a cruel and catastrophic winter for the state of South Carolina. Having completed his destructive march through Georgia, General William T. Sherman took possession of the coastal city of…
Karen Stokes
January 7, 2015
Review Posts

The Despot’s Heel Was On Thy Shore

Maryland is steeped in the history of the American Union. She fiercely defended her position amongst the thirteen original states as a free, independent, and sovereign state. She was the last to accede to The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The first article of the Maryland Declaration of Rights states, “That all Government of right originates from the People,…
Scott Strzelczyk
January 6, 2015
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The “Hard Hand of War”

The kind of military onslaught that Union Gen. William Sherman unleashed on the South, beginning with his infamous conquest of Atlanta and subsequent "March to the Sea," followed by his capture of Savannah 150 years ago this month, came to be called, in the 20th century, "total war." That meant a war waged with full military mobilization not only against…
Kirkpatrick Sale
January 5, 2015
Blog

The Year in Review

2014 was a remarkable year for the Abbeville Institute. 1. Our well attended Twelfth Annual Summer School focused on the War for Southern Independence. Southerners fought the bloodiest war of the 19th century against overwhelming odds for national independence. About a quarter of Confederate generals were born in the North or in Europe. Why were so many Northerners who had…
Donald Livingston
January 1, 2015