Monthly Archives

October 2019

Blog

How Yankees Fostered Southern Disease

In August of 1862, two years before his infamous ‘March to the Sea’, General William T. Sherman declared, “Salt is eminently contraband.” The Southern leaders’ positioning of the South’s economy as dependent on cash crops created well-known shortages of many sorts. One aspect of this approach concerned the use of money acquired from cash crops to purchase food and salt.…
Vann Boseman
October 31, 2019
Blog

California, the Chinese, and Nullification

J.P. Morgan, tycoon banker and a close friend to President Stephen Grover Cleveland, observed that “a man always has two reasons for the things he does a good one and the real one.” In the case for reconstruction the Republicans who ruled the senate majority knew they needed to do something to prevent the reseating or readmitting of Southern senators…
Justin Pederson
October 30, 2019
Review Posts

The Secession Movement in the Middle States

A review of The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973) by William C. Wright (WCW) "Historical writing during the Civil War and immediately after noted the existence of these men. As the years passed, however, historians came to accept the view that Lincoln had the full support of the North prior to the attack…
Vito Mussomeli
October 29, 2019
Blog

What Jefferson Davis Would Tell Us Today (And Why It Matters)

In our turbulent times it is increasingly evident that our government is disconnected to the citizens of the republic. Rather, what we behold is a zealous managerial class, an elite buried deep in an aggressive bureaucracy which is, essentially, a “government within a government.” It is an unelected, self-perpetuating oligarchy that offers the illusion of popular participation, and the chimerical…
Boyd Cathey
October 28, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 192

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 21-25, 2019 Topics: Political Correctness, Reconstruction, Southern History https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-192
Brion McClanahan
October 26, 2019
Blog

A Southern Poetry Sampler

The Soiling of Old Glory by Stanley Forman When I See That Flag Flying by John Parker When I see that flag flying I see my people dying Defending their land From its invasion. When I see that flag waving I feel my people's craving For the short-lived Independence which That flag took away. When I see that flag blowing…
Abbeville Institute
October 25, 2019
Blog

To the Southern Soldiers

Heartbroken, I have learned that my beloved Bentonville, Arkansas, has been attacked. The Confederate monument that rests in the center of our town square has been defaced. The carpetbaggers that have lately inundated Bentonville have chosen to eradicate part of our history; our history, not theirs. James Henderson Berry served as a second lieutenant with the 16th Arkansas Infantry, losing…
Neil Kumar
October 24, 2019
Blog

Behind Enemy Lines

Just before Christmas of 1860, the chain of events that was to soon to lead the nation into four bloody years of undeclared war began with South Carolina exercising its constitutional right to leave the Union and revert to its original status as a sovereign entity.  Six of South Carolina’s neighboring States quickly followed her out of the Union and…
John Marquardt
October 23, 2019
Review Posts

A Confederate Dialogue

A review of The Lytle-Tate Letters: The Correspondence of Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate (University of Mississippi Press, 1987), Thomas Daniel Young and Elizabeth Sarcone, eds. Considering Allen Tate’s well-documented contrariness, the four-decade-long friendship of Tate and Andrew Lytle must be considered one of the great creative acts in the lives of both men. That the two men could keep…
Tom Rash
October 22, 2019
Blog

The South Starts Here

You know, as a kid who grew up without electricity, a telephone or indoor plumbing, it continues to amaze me that I posted a picture of a sign in front of a gas station/store down on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, added some thoughts of my own, and several hundred thousand people saw it and shared it and debated it…
Ben Jones
October 21, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 191

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 14-18, 2019 Topics: Southern tradition, Thomas Jefferson, Agrarianism, Reconciliation https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-191
Brion McClanahan
October 19, 2019
Blog

“My Countrymen”

Charles Francis Adams was the grandson and son of former-Presidents John and John Quincy Adams. It ​is therefore of little surprise he himself embarked on career and life of public prominence as an educator, ​newspaperman, politician, statesman and historian. Yet, while he never assumed the high offices which the ​chieftains of his famed family did, the great contributions which Adams…
Gerald Lefurgy
October 18, 2019
Blog

The Myth of Tom and Sally

In 1993 the Washington Post published an article on research being conducted by an accomplished Richmond lawyer named Robert Cooley. According to this article, among many additional details in regard to the subject, Cooley had been working with scholars for years to examine land deeds owned by the descendants of Thomas Jefferson, for the purpose of investigating specifically what land…
H.L. Dowless
October 17, 2019
Blog

What Price Prosperity?

The news media rarely, if ever, focuses on the impact on society and culture the price of economic growth. Nor do politicians.   This begs the question, what price is extracted from society and culture in the pursuit of economic growth, in particular, when the central and state governments along with the central bank play key roles, namely in the of…
Nicole Williams
October 16, 2019
Review Posts

The Bard of Kentucky

A review of Wendell Berry: Port William Novels and Stories (Library of America, 2018), Jack Shoemaker, ed. The long shelf of fiction by Wendell Berry—overshadowed by the colossal green canopy of his poetry and agrarian essays—has been brought into the light by the Library of America. Wendell Berry: Port William Novels and Stories, the first of two volumes that will…
Rafael Alvarez
October 15, 2019
Blog

Stranger in a Strange Land

I recently relocated--with any luck, temporarily--to a sprawling metroplex of a city of almost seven million, within an even more massive state. I’d believed I understood globalism and loss of identity. I thought I had made an uneasy peace with the reality of modernism and destruction of memory.  I had no idea.  Not only is there no regional culture here—one of…
Leslie Alexander
October 14, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 190

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 7-11, 2019 Topics: Jeffersonian Tradition, United States Constitution, Black Confederates https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-190
Brion McClanahan
October 12, 2019
Blog

St. George Tucker’s Jeffersonian Constitution

One could argue that there are two basic visions for America: the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian. The former is nationalist, calling for centralized power and an industrial, mercantilist society characterized by banking, commercialism, and a robust military. Its early leaders had monarchical tendencies. The latter vision involves a slower, more leisurely and agrarian society, political decentralization, popular sovereignty, and local…
Allen Mendenhall
October 11, 2019
Blog

What the Newspapers Said: The Black Confederate “Myth” Examined

Where did the belief in the "black Confederate soldier" originate? Did it begin in 1977, after the success of the television mini-series Roots caused people to reevaluate race and slavery during the Civil War? Were stories of these men absent before then, as one of many historians who tackles this topic claims? Is it accurate or indeed fair to describe…
Shane Anderson
October 9, 2019
Review Posts

Ode to Father Abraham

A review of Lincoln (Simon and Schuster, 1995) by David Herbert Donald Professor David Herbert Donald of Harvard University, a son of Mississippi and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is one of the most prominent historians of the late twentieth century. His biography of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts—probably the most sanctimonious politician in American history— earned that statesman the label…
Kevin R.C. Gutzman
October 8, 2019
Blog

Whatever Happened to Democracy?

Those of us whose experience goes back a way into the last century, can remember when “democracy” was the main theme of American discourse.  A million tongues proudly and repeatedly declared that America was the Democracy, exemplar and defender of that sacred idea to all the world.  Hardly anyone dared to question that sentiment.  It saw us through two world…
Clyde Wilson
October 7, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 189

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 30 - Oct 4, 2019 Topics: Southern Tradition, Political Correctness, Neoconservatives, United States Constitution, Federalism https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-189
Brion McClanahan
October 5, 2019
Blog

How the Neocons are Helping Destroy Western Civilization

Every now and then an acquaintance who reads what I write will ask me: “Boyd, why are you so critical of writers and commentators—Neoconservatives—like Victor Davis Hanson, Ben Shapiro, Brian Kilmeade, and those who appear on Fox News? Why do you seem so condemnatory of articles and essays that show up in, say, National Review or The Wall Street Journal?…
Boyd Cathey
October 4, 2019
Blog

The South and “Red Flag” Laws

These days, we see many politicians pushing relentlessly for gun control. In the wake of recent mass shootings, several so-called “conservatives” have shown their true colors by demonizing gun owners and misrepresenting the facts on the issue. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called critics of red flag laws “libertarians” and stated that “the Second Amendment is not a suicide…
Michael Martin
October 3, 2019
Blog

Root, Root, Root for the Home Team

The 150th season of college football serves as a reminder of the intersection between sports and local communities. While the nationalization of sports media outlets brings games and analysis to every living room in America, fan culture retains a very distinct regional and local flavor. College football is one of the greatest testimonies to the endurance of localism in America…
Brian Koss
October 2, 2019