Monthly Archives

July 2019

Colonial Slavery Blog

Colonial Slavery

In 1715, Colonial Governor Charles Craven remarked that his front line troops in the fight against a hostile American Indian tribe comprised "two hundred stout negro men." Just five years prior, Indian agent Thomas Nairne wrote that the colonial militia in this same colony possessed "a considerable Number of active, able, Negro Slaves; and the Law gives everyone of those…
Brion McClanahan
July 31, 2019
Jeffersonians Against Imperialism Review Posts

Jeffersonians Against Imperialism

J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power, 1966 and The Price of Empire, 1967 Robert C. Byrd, Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency, 2004 Known and celebrated as a “liberal” during the Vietnam War era, Fulbright was actually a quite independent-minded public figure.  In some respects he represented a remnant of the Southern Democratic Jeffersonian tradition, and he…
Clyde Wilson
July 30, 2019
Driving Through Virginia’s Historic Triangle, Part II Blog

Driving Through Virginia’s Historic Triangle, Part II

George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson trod the roads of this area as the colony of Virginia grew. George Mason, James Madison and Richard Henry Lee sat in the public houses debating political events. British royal governors, the comte de Rochambeau, Marquis de Lafayette and the Baron von Steuben were just a few of the many Europeans passing across…
Brett Moffatt
July 29, 2019
Confederate Monuments and Racism? Blog

Confederate Monuments and Racism?

As noted in earlier posts, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and many academic historians are promoting a false narrative that the Confederate statues erected between 1900 and 1920 were celebrations of white supremacy. In reality, the statues were built because the old veterans were dying-off, which is why there was also a simultaneous surge in Civil War memorial-building in…
Philip Leigh
July 26, 2019
Allen Tate’s Confederate Ode: Who are the Living and the Dead? Blog

Allen Tate’s Confederate Ode: Who are the Living and the Dead?

 Then Lytle asked: Who are the dead? Who are the living and the dead? Allen Tate, “The Oath” Over the decades since its first publication in 1927 Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” has probably received more critical and popular attention than any of his other poems. Tate himself alludes to some of it in his own commentary on the…
Thomas Hubert
July 24, 2019
The Barber of Natchez Review Posts

The Barber of Natchez

Review of The Barber of Natchez (LSU, 1954, 1973) edited by Edwin Adams Davis and William Ransom Hogan. Author's Note: In 1938 a trove of documents dating from 1793 -1937, "over 60 volumes of account books, "nearly 1400" financial and legal documents, bound and unbound volumes of "rare antebellum newspapers" including 2 editions unknown before, "over 400" sheets of 19th century…
Vito Mussomeli
July 23, 2019
The Neo-Confederate SCOTUS Justice Blog

The Neo-Confederate SCOTUS Justice

On February 4, 2002, a current member of the United States Supreme Court gave the following remarks at Loyola University, in New Orleans: a tribute to Judah P. Benjamin, a former U.S. Senator who resigned and took part in the secession of Louisiana.  He was quickly appointed to a cabinet post by President Jefferson Davis: first as Attorney General, and subsequently…
Rev. Larry Beane
July 19, 2019
The Land of Lincoln Bans Confederate Railroad Blog

The Land of Lincoln Bans Confederate Railroad

Illinois’ Governor J.B. Pritzer has banned the Southern rock band Confederate Railroad from the Illinois State Fair because of the band’s name and Confederate flag on their logo. He said that the administration bars using resources to promote symbols of racism. Well, kiss my grits. Let’s look at the state fair’s “Land of Lincoln.” “The land of Lincoln” is the…
Paul H. Yarbrough
July 17, 2019
On Ballylee: The Enduring Legacy of Our Fathers’ Fields Review Posts

On Ballylee: The Enduring Legacy of Our Fathers’ Fields

A retrospective review of Our Fathers’ Fields: A Southern Story (University of South Carolina Press, 1998) by James Everett Kibler, Jr. On June 7, 1998, I opened a copy of The State newspaper from Columbia, South Carolina, and read a review of a book that I immediately knew I had to own. The article, “Family Ties: Author Looks at Hardy…
Robin Spencer Lattimore
July 16, 2019
A History Lesson for Ted Cruz Blog

A History Lesson for Ted Cruz

I am always annoyed when a conservative political leader attacks Southern heritage. I don’t know why because with the present-day crop of cowardly politicians, it is becoming routine, but I am. Unwittingly or not, these modern day Scalawags adopt the “politically correct” line, even though they know (or should know) that political correctness is nothing more than a euphemism for…
Samuel W. Mitcham
July 15, 2019
Dabney’s Warning for the New South Blog

Dabney’s Warning for the New South

Robert Lewis Dabney (1820–1898) defended the South both during and after the War Between the States. During the war, this professor of theology left his work at Union Theological Seminary to serve as chaplain for the Confederacy in 1861 and then as chief of staff to General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in 1862. After the war, Dabney made it one of…
Zachary Garris
July 12, 2019
The War Power is All Power Blog

The War Power is All Power

A bill to establish a Bureau of Freedmen’s Affairs was introduced in the House of Representatives on February 17, 1864, by Massachusetts Republican Rep. Thomas D. Eliot. Democrat Rep. Samuel S. “Sunset” Cox of Ohio responds to the bill, in part, below. www.Circa1865.org   The Great American Political Divide The War Power is All Power “Mr. Cox said: “Mr. Speaker .…
Bernard Thuersam
July 11, 2019
Republican Revisionists Blog

Republican Revisionists

There is a modern notion among the Republicans and their most vocal acolytes such as Dinesh D’Souza and Mark Levin that the Republicans are the healers and the Democrats are the racists. One political party and its advocates invent as much as the other. These two devotees calling themselves conservatives, strain to blame the Democrat party for slavery, Jim Crow…
Paul H. Yarbrough
July 10, 2019
Know Dixie, Know America Review Posts

Know Dixie, Know America

A review of Conserving America (St. Augustine Press, 2016) by Patrick J. Deneen Man has been created by God in such a way that the larger the object of his love the less directly attached he is to it.  His heart needs particular passions; he needs limited objects for his attraction to keep these firm and enduring … I am…
Jerry Salyer
July 9, 2019
An Okie From Muskogee Blog

An Okie From Muskogee

As someone who grew up during the decade of the 1960’s, I am paying attention when I hear those on the Left talking of the events which took place 50 years ago. I was born in Dallas, Texas, but my family moved to Fairfax County, Virginia, when I was four. I lived in Northern Virginia during that decade. At the…
Timothy A. Duskin
July 8, 2019
Conan the Southerner? Blog

Conan the Southerner?

“Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to bear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high…
Joel T. Leggett
July 5, 2019
Civil War PC is Mental Imprisonment Blog

Civil War PC is Mental Imprisonment

Each of us tends to be a prisoner of our own experience. In a World with billions of people, we experience only a tiny part. Thus, we rely upon our imaginations to complete a mental picture that results in our “worldview,” meaning our personal conception of the World. Moreover, our imaginations are fed by the narratives we learn from academics,…
Philip Leigh
July 4, 2019
How to Be a Conservative and the Southern Tradition Review Posts

How to Be a Conservative and the Southern Tradition

A review of How To Be a Conservative (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2015), by Sir Roger Scruton. It is highly unusual for any political leader to articulate any sort of learned political philosophy that underscores their beliefs or policy actions in any legislative chamber at the local, state or Federal level.  This, despite the existence of organizations such as the Abbeville Institute,…
Nicole Williams
July 2, 2019
Say It Ain’t So, Joe! Blog

Say It Ain’t So, Joe!

Joe Biden is at it again.  The longtime senator from Delaware, former Vice President of the United States, and current Democratic presidential nomination front-runner recently confirmed his reputation as a human gaffe machine by admitting, in public, that he maintained cordial relations with Southern segregationist colleagues in the Senate forty-five years ago.  After acknowledging that he’s “old-fashioned” compared to “the…
Houston Middleton
July 1, 2019