The Southern Remnant Blog Post

In the summer of 2020, overwhelmed with sorrow and horror over the removal of our historical monuments, the renaming of our historical places, and the rewriting of our history, I wrote a trio, and then a duo, of essays titled ‘The Southern Remnant.’ Inspired by an anonymous writer who advised, ‘We must become living monuments,’ I exhorted others who felt…

James Rutledge Roesch
July 19, 2023

America’s Real Peculiar Institution Blog Post

From the 2005 Abbeville Institute Summer School. When John C. Calhoun spoke of slavery as “the peculiar institution,” he didn’t mean to say that there was anything peculiar about slavery, as it has been interpreted since. He only meant to say that slavery was peculiar to the Southern States in the same sense that whaling fleets were peculiar to New…

Clyde Wilson
February 13, 2023

The Republican Reign of Terror Blog Post

From the 2005 Abbeville Institute Summer School. My subject is the Northern Reign of Terror in the Summer of 1861. But before we get to the actual atrocities, I have to set up why they happened by getting into the mind, not of the whole North, but of the Republican North. There is much evidence that Republicans conceived the War,…

H. A. Scott Trask
February 9, 2023

Every Southerner Needs This Magazine Blog Post

On various occasions I’ve made references to Chronicles Magazine and cited articles printed in it. Remarkably, Chronicles is the only print magazine of stature (it is also online) in America which has represented and aired traditionalist conservative viewpoints, in depth and intelligently, now for forty-four years. Edited by Dr. Paul Gottfried (Raffensperger Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, Elizabethtown College), the magazine includes some of the finest writers…

Boyd Cathey
April 22, 2020

Never Trumpers Like Joe Biden and Hate the South Blog Post

Thoughtful Southerners of a conservative and traditional bent have known since the 1980s that the old Conservative Movement which began back in the 1950s with the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, and then with the inauguration of William F. Buckley’s National Review, has no room for them, no room for their writers (unless those authors pass a rigorous…

Boyd Cathey
April 2, 2020

The Saints Are Marching On, and On, and On… Blog Post

A review of Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North by Jennifer L. Weber (Oxford University Press, 2007). They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case it is worth much more: 217 pages of them. The text comes wrapped in a handsome dust jacket, colored black and gold and featuring an arresting…

H. A. Scott Trask
July 31, 2018

Jacobin Yankees Blog Post

Martin Scorcese, in an interview, candidly described his new film, “Gangs of New York,” as an “opera.” He had been asked whether the events portrayed were true to history. I took his reply to mean that the events of the movie were selected and organized for dramatic emphasis and were not to be taken as literal factual record. And, indeed,…

Clyde Wilson
November 2, 2016

Who Won the Webster-Hayne Debate of 1830? Blog Post

The dominant historical opinion of the famous debate between Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Young Hayne of South Carolina which took place in the United States Senate in 1830 has long been that Webster defeated Hayne both as an orator and a statesman. According to the legend, Webster managed in the course of the debate to isolate the South,…

H. A. Scott Trask
August 30, 2016

The War for Southern Independence: My Myth or Yours? Blog Post

In the antebellum era, Matthew Carey, Philadelphia publisher and journalist, was the most zealous and articulate advocate of a protective tariff to raise the price of imported goods so high that American manufacturers would be guaranteed a closed internal market that would provide them with growth and profits. He believed fervently that this was necessary to build a strong country.  …

Clyde Wilson
September 1, 2015

A Bostonian on the Causes of the War, Part IV Blog Post

Part IV (Final) from a section of Dr. Scott Trask’s work in progress, Copperheads and Conservatives. Part I. Part II. Part III. Massachusetts’ Politics It is one of the perils and paradoxes of democracy that it often bestows disproportionate power and influence upon a minority. Two-party democracies are the most susceptible to this reversal of the familiar and rather tiresome…

H. A. Scott Trask
May 19, 2014

A Bostonian on the Causes of the War, Part III Blog Post

Part III from a section of Dr. Scott Trask’s work in progress, Copperheads and Conservatives. Part I. Part II. Warnings of the Wrath to Come Southerners were by no means alone in deprecating the antislavery agitation. The northern anti-abolition movement was far stronger than the movement it opposed. Many northern leaders accurately forecast the consequences of agitation. In his annual…

H. A. Scott Trask
May 13, 2014

A Bostonian on the Causes of the War, Part II Blog Post

Part II from a section of Dr. Scott Trask’s work in progress, Copperheads and Conservatives. Part I. Historical Survey Lunt believed that the celebrated Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in the territories north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, had been a mistake. It was not because he believed slavery could have been profitably introduced…

H. A. Scott Trask
May 6, 2014

A Bostonian on the Causes of the War, Part I Blog Post

Part I from a section of Dr. Scott Trask’s work in progress, Copperheads and Conservatives. [The extent and respectability of Northern opposition to Lincoln and his war is one of the best kept secrets of American history. The widespread notion that Northerners, except for a very few evil traitors, rallied in enthusiastic support of Lincoln and his revolutionary invasion and…

H. A. Scott Trask
May 3, 2014