Although commonly portrayed as one of the largest mob attacks on blacks by white racists during Reconstruction, the so-called 1874 Battle of Liberty Place in New Orleans was really a…
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Robert E. Lee considered reconciliation and education to be his highest duties after the War. While many other Confederate leaders left the United States, Lee remained in Virginia and worked…
Robert E. Lee’s tenure as President of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) should be regarded as one of the most important events in American educational history, and it…
Ty Seidule’s mea culpa memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me, has generated the predictable supporters: mainstream media outlets, leftist dominated history departments, and neoconservative “intellectuals.” This says more about Seidule…
Yesterday’s melee in Washington provides good reason to honor Robert E. Lee because he demonstrated how he maintained dignity in defeat while convincing many resentful Southerners to reconcile with their…
Legendary financier J. P. Morgan once said: “A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.” His meaning is that our public explanation…
From the 2020 Abbeville Institute conference on “Who Owns America?” October 16-17, 2020 in Charleston, SC.
From the 2020 Abbeville Institute conference on “Who Owns America?” October 16-17, 2020 in Charleston, SC.
While watching a seventy-minute interview with Professor Adam Domby about his book, The False Cause, I was surprised at the number of errors, biased interpretations and even endorsement of “extralegal” conduct by anti-statue…
A typical calumny directed at Confederate soldiers is that they don’t merit commemoration because they were traitors. It is a lie for two reasons. First, the Confederate states had no…
Identity Politics is changing our language in order to advance its agenda. One example is “people of color.” Hemingway would have convulsed at such a laborious construction. Does its nearly…
The Confederacy never organized a Supreme Court because her founders generally interpreted the U. S. Constitution strictly. Over the years they had seen that the U. S. Supreme Court tended to make…
A review of The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee (Forge Books, 2006) by Thomas Fleming Fleming uses this 2006 fictional courtroom drama to formulate arguments for his 2013 Disease in…
As explained yesterday, Washington Post reporter Courtland Milloy maligned my “Defending Confederate Monuments” speech presented on Lee-Jackson Day in Lexington, Virginia. He asked that I send him a copy while we were sitting together…
On January 21st Washington Post reporter Courtland Milloy wrote an article about my “Defending Confederate Monuments” speech at the January18th Lee-Jackson Day in Lexington, Virginia. His “Lee-Jackson Day with a bit of history and context” article portrays…
An excerpt from North Carolina author Robert Ruark’s best known novel reads: “If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he…
Despite his unrivaled popularity after the Civil War, Republcan Ulysses Grant won the presidency merely three years later in 1868 by a popular vote margin of only 53%-to-47%. In fact,…
Confederate statue critics increasingly argue that the monuments should be torn down because they honor traitors. Among such advocates is Christy Coleman, CEO of the Richmond’s American Civil War Museum. While the…
Conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager has become a YouTube success with his five-minute videos on politics, history, religion and culture. They’ve been viewed 2.5 billion times and he gets…
Prager U and the American Battlefield Trust recently teamed-up to sponsor this six minute video by Princeton University’s Dr. Allen Guelzo who claims that “the North won the Civil War but the…
This essay was presented at the 2019 Abbeville Institute Summer School on the New South. In 1965 Texas novelist William Humphrey wrote: If the Civil War is more alive to…
Mr. Leigh presented this paper at the 2019 Abbeville Institute Summer School on The New South. Historians have reinterpreted Civil War Reconstruction over the past fifty years. Shortly before the…
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…
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…
Silent Sam was a Confederate statue that stood on the University of North Carolina campus at Chapel Hill for 104 years after its 1913 dedication. A student mob toppled it…
One argument used by those wanting to remove Confederate statues is that contemporary blacks had little chance to oppose them when they were erected. Aside from anecdotal evidence that blacks joined white crowds…
The Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial Commission of the Virginia General Assembly announced that it will spend taxpayer money to erect a statue honoring Nat Turner who was the leader of a drunken…
History is remembered as a narrative, not facts and figures. If the story is told from the viewpoint of past sins, the rendering condemns our ancestors and makes us ashamed…
In 1965 Texas novelist William Humphrey wrote: If the Civil War is more alive to the Southerner than the Northerner it is because all of the past is, and this is so…
Whoever weds himself to the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next. — William Inge Few realize that Florida was so committed to…
Even among the most Grant-partial historians there’s no denying that Ulysses Grant and his wife owned slaves prior to the Civil War. In fact, “Ulysses Grant” is the correct answer…
Yesterday The Washington Post published an Op-Ed by former General Stanley McChrystal in which he boasted of removing a long-displayed Robert E. Lee painting from his home to “send it on its…
On October 31, 1910—seven years after the Wright Brother’s first airplane flight of less than a minute—seventy-five thousand spectators gathered at Belmont Park to watch a day of competition among…
In a PBS interview seven years ago historian and Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War. “Historians are pretty united on the cause of…
The diagram below graphs the number of Confederate statues erected between 1870 and 1980. Since the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) compiled the data, they suggest the memorials were most…
The quote below indirectly warns about the implications of Confederate statue removals and the censorship of Southern interpretations regarding the Civil War and Reconstruction. Kundera is presently a French…
Five days ago I posted an article citing Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed that stated the first American flag to fly over the conquered Japanese fortress at Shuri Castle during the World…
President Trump’s proposed ten-percent tariff on refined aluminum yields a teachable moment for Southern history students. Historical analysis of the industry reveals an echo of the Northern tariff policies that…
Most modern historians reject any suggestion that the South fought the Civil War over states’ rights. They insist that the only states’ rights the South cared about, “as neo-confederates are…
Although labeled a Western, True Grit is also a novel about Reconstruction in Arkansas and the Indian Territory that would become eastern Oklahoma. The Reconstruction aspects are more evident in the novel,…
Those who have read his Count of Monte Cristo can readily appreciate the wisdom of Alexander Dumas who wrote, “The difference between treason and patriotism is a matter of dates.” Similarly, Civil…
Yesterday’s Washington Post had an article about eighty-eight year old Nelson Winbush who is a Florida black man and proponent of Confederate monuments. His grandfather, Louis Napoleon Nelson, was a Tennessee slave…
In 1958 a nearly forgotten thirty-four year old Texas author named William Humphrey debuted his first novel, Home From the Hill, to widespread praise. Legendary director Vincente Minnelli released a film version only…
Was California Governor and Senator Leland Stanford—founder of Stanford University—sufficiently racist to justify dropping his name from the university and destroying all publicly displayed memorials to him? Consider Stanford’s remarks…
Most modern historians give the post Civil War Republican Party a free pass on racism. They generally presume that the Party’s demand for black suffrage and civil rights in the…
Despite nearly universal scolding in the mainstream media, President Trump’s suggestion that a compromise similar to the one Andrew Jackson arranged during the 1832 South Carolina nullification crisis might have prevented…
The Union League is one of the most cryptic of Civil War and Reconstruction era topics even though it was a wellspring of tyranny. Together with the Loyal League identical twin, Southern chapters…
Since most modern historians agree that the South seceded to protect slavery they often conclude that the Civil War was “all about” slavery. The inference, however, overlooks the possibility that…
In 1935 the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) constructed Confederate Memorial Hall as a residence for girls at Nashville’s Peabody College. Originally residents who were descendants of Confederate veterans…
Post Civil War racial adjustment was a problem Southerner whites didn’t want to face and Northerner whites declined to share. When the war started 40% of the Confederacy’s population was…
Editor’s note: Mr. Leigh has published a new book titled The Confederacy at Flood Tide. A sample chapter is available here. I once attempted to correct a Wikipedia article by…
As the Sesquicentennial of Reconstruction progresses and the popular press debates whether slavery merits reparations, few students of the era realize that Southerners have already paid a form of reparations;…
Few, if any, currently prominent historians voice unqualified objection to the destruction of Confederate monuments. The most tolerant among them instead suggest that the memorials should remain, but with new…
It is no surprise to Civil War students that Ulysses Grant’s reputation has soared over the last fifty years. During the past twenty years nearly all of his biographies have…
In the wake of growing hostility toward the Confederacy a New Orleans Robert E. Lee statue is scheduled for destruction and debate is underway in Charlottesville, Virginia to remove another…
Widely praised for his 2009 Cotton and Race in the Making of America, author Gene Dattel recently wrote an article titled “The Untold Story of Reconstruction,” in the September 2015…
Wouldn’t it be great if an act of Congress enabled your federal government bonds to be worth twice what you paid for them? That’s precisely what happened for many federal…
From April to July of 1863 British Lieutenant Colonel Arthur J. L. Fremantle visited all but two Confederate states. He entered at Brownsville, Texas and finished by observing the battle…
The month following Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, Andrew Johnson submitted for comment to his cabinet a plan for reconstructing the Union to include the former…
The table below summarizes Federal Tax revenues and spending for twenty years following the Civil War. For clarity, the total period is separated into four discrete five-year intervals. As may…
Fifty years ago the master narrative of the Civil War Centennial failed to synchronize with the momentous 1960s Civil Rights movement. It minimized the roles of slavery and race. Instead…
Fifty years ago the master narrative of the Civil War Centennial failed to synchronize with the momentous 1960s Civil Rights movement. It minimized the roles of slavery and race. Instead…
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