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December 4, 2025

Weaver’s Lessons for the Modern Right

First published at The Daily Economy. The modern American right could stand to gain from the insight of Richard M. Weaver. Weaver, a twentieth-century conservative of the Southern tradition, perceived the dangers of radical ideologies as well as the extent to which American thinking offered the viable alternative. Amid the disagreements and controversies of our present moment, today’s various libertarians,…
Justin Madura 1
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December 3, 2025

Commander-in-Chief and Journalistic “Wisdom”

I feel saddened (actually just mystified) at the accepted notion that the president is elected as commander-in-chief of the country. Somehow the sages of journalism have interpreted, as a result of some extracurricular activities of various presidents over the years, that because the term CIC is present in Article 2 and since the president’s duties fall under this same article,…
Paul H. Yarbrough 5
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December 2, 2025

Rethinking the Southern Tradition

Nullification is in the news, but not because the American right considers it to be a viable response to federal overreach. Mainstream conservatives have decided that classifying their leftist opponents as “neo-Confederates” interested in nullification will win political points at the next election. Victor Davis Hanson makes this a central theme of his ongoing attack on the Democratic Party. You…
Abbeville Institute 11
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December 1, 2025

A Short History of the South, Part 4

Originally published at Reckonin.com “Reconstruction,” 1865-1877 Through most of the 20th century, American historians of every stripe (except Communists) agreed that “Reconstruction” was an ugly period in our history - a regime of corruption, tyranny, bad leadership, and dangerous deviation from American principles. Honest historians found a vast treasury of evidence for this interpretation that is available but now ignored.…
Clyde Wilson 4
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November 26, 2025

Abe’s Civil War Narrative Meets its Waterloo

 A review of Defending Dixie’s Land: What every American should know about the South and the Civil War (Shotwell, 2025) by Isaac C. Bishop/Jeb Smith To read a new book which is not only difficult to put down but compels one to urge others to read, is a rarity these days.  Indeed, so rare that one is inclined to think…
Marcus Papadopoulos 11
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November 25, 2025

The Paradox of Freedom

A Review of Paradox of Freedom: A History of Black Slaveholders in America (Scuppernong Press, 2025) by Larry McCluney I recently completed Larry Allen McCluney, Jr.’s book, The Paradox of Freedom: A History of Black Slaveholders in America. This rarely discussed subject deserves more attention, and I am glad McCluney is giving it the attention it needs. An Instructor of…
Jeb Smith 2
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November 24, 2025

Framing a Legend

“Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known and seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. ~Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on Religion,” 1776 INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER 5 OF FRAMING A LEGEND:…
M. Andrew Holowchak 2
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November 21, 2025

Fighting Globalism with the Power of Dance

Appalachia was dying. It had been the most self-sufficient region of the country in 1840, but the eighty years that followed saw the culture of Appalachia come under a series of unrelenting attacks. The first blow came during the Civil War. Far from the homogenous block of Union sympathizers that liberal academics have made the region out to be since…
Benjamin Grist 3
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November 20, 2025

How Establishment Historians Conflate Facts and Ideology

Establishment historians often conflate historical facts with the establishment-friendly inferences which they derive from those facts. They then report their conclusions as merely “the historical facts,” which they solemnly declare to be “based on primary sources”. They insist that nobody can reasonably disagree with them, because they are merely reporting the facts. This article will focus on two examples, the…
Wanjiru Njoya 10
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November 19, 2025

The Day After in the Old Dominion

Virginia’s contribution to the blue wave this fall saw the usual round of Republican hand wringing and finger pointing. President Donald Trump blamed the defeats in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City on the absence of his name on the ballot, as well as voter frustration with the government shutdown. Concerning the governor’s race in Virginia, several pundits blame…
John Devanny 6
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November 18, 2025

A Low Country Bar-B-Q

It all started on my sister Robin’s front porch in Goochland one evening last summer. Cousin Jody and Miss Donna had come up to see one of their grandsons, who is at the University of Virginia. I had been invited over for supper that evening for a visit, and we were reminiscing about the “cousin’s house parties” that we all…
H.V. Traywick, Jr. 6
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November 17, 2025

A 14th Amendment Mindset

Brion McClanahan presents "A 14th Amendment MIndset" at the October 2025 Abbeville Institute conference on the 14th Amendment in Columbus, GA. Purchase all the lectures from the conference HERE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_ZDyuKg5BE
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November 13, 2025

Time Will Tell

Time Will Tell: Collected Poems of David Middleton (2025) The publication of David Middleton’s collected verse, from 1973 to the present year, in 362 pages, is a hallmark event in Southern culture.  It is also a significant event in American literature. But you will not see much attention to either of these facts. The great literary journals founded by great…
Clyde Wilson 2
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November 12, 2025

The Secession Alternative for Red Counties in Virginia

For Virginia, the Mother of States and Statesmen, things are looking bleak.  Even during the darkest moments of the War between the States, Virginians had the Army of Northern Virginia, led by the remarkable General Lee, along with Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, and others, to give them hope that their difficulties would give way to better times.  Together they were,…
Walt Garlington 8
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November 11, 2025

A Lil Church

"Christian music is everywhere--whether you realize it or not." That headline was not produced by a Christian publication. The Wall Street Journal ran it on November 8, 2025. According to the article, popular Christian music is the fastest growing genre in the entertainment industry. In other words, Christian music has gone mainstream. A couple of weeks ago, I attended the…
Brion McClanahan 2
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November 10, 2025

Robert E. Lee’s Refusal to Commit Treason

Originally published at the Alabama Gazette. In a rare case of self-inflicted torture, I watched some of Maine Senator Angus King’s questioning of Pete Hegseth, U.S. Secretary of Defense (now War). Various topics were covered, including the renaming of bases. King falsely accused Robert E. Lee of committing treason by resigning from the U.S. Army and siding with his State…
John M. Taylor 16
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November 7, 2025

Thomas Jefferson Visits the Natural Bridge

(A story told, for no good reason, wholly in the present tense.) On August 18, 1767, Thomas Jefferson makes his way to the Natural Bridge. The trip is arduous, for the route is arduous and anfractuous. He stays first at Steele’s Tavern and then at PaAxton’s Tavern in Glasgow, where Paxton and his sons likely take Jefferson to find the…
M. Andrew Holowchak 2
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November 6, 2025

A Short History of the South, Part 3

Originally published at Reckonin.com The War for Southern Independence, 1861-1865  Americans generally miss the point in considering the great war of 1861-1865. The simple fact is that it was an unprovoked war of invasion, conquest, and exploitation of some Americans by a minority party in control of the federal machine. The invasion does not fit any of the requirements of…
Clyde Wilson 4
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November 5, 2025

Refusing to be Forgotten

A review of Refusing to be Forgotten: Southern Conservatism and the Political Thought of M. E. Bradford (New York, 2023) by Marcin Gajek Marcin Gajek’s Refusing to be Forgotten (Vol. 56 in Peter Lang’s Studies in Politics, Security and Society) is a scholarly work in three lengthy chapters that provides a rigorous and welcome evaluation of M. E. Bradford, an American…
Clifford A. Bates, Jr. 5
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November 4, 2025

How Chicago Politics Sparked the Civil War

This post was originally published at ChroniclesMagazine.org. A review of A Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War (Scribner, 2024) by David S. Brown The key to understanding the U.S. Civil War is the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed individual U.S. states to decide on the legality…
William J. Watkins 4
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November 3, 2025

The Expansion of Slavery or States’ Rights?

In my various interactions with promoters of the winners’ version of the Civil War, I often hear that the South and the Confederacy desired to expand slavery into the western territories, to reignite the slave trade, and generally to create a republic built upon slave labor; and that they left the Union to protect slavery and its extension into the…
Jeb Smith 10
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October 31, 2025

The Graveyard Crossroads of Grady

Grady, Alabama, was never more than a dot on the map, a rural settlement where the fields pressed in close and the pines rose taller than the houses. It lay twenty or so miles south of Montgomery, past the sprawl of the city and into a quieter country of red clay and sandy roads. The WSFA Tall Tower looms over…
Tom Daniel 2
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October 30, 2025

How John Taylor of Caroline Unmasked the Tyranny of Special Privileges

This piece was originally published at fee.org Taylor’s arguments are as relevant today as they were in the 1820s. John Taylor (1753–1824) of Caroline County, Virginia, is not often remembered as a key figure in the early American Republic, but for champions of liberty, perhaps he ought to be. While Taylor’s life included stints as a lawyer, Revolutionary War officer,…
Justin Madura 0
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October 29, 2025

Defending Dixie’s Land

Are you interested in knowing the actual history of your country, or are you content with the propagandized version the winners of wars conjure up to feed school children? When it comes to the story and tradition of the U.S. South, and especially the events surrounding the Civil War (1861–1865), you may need to brace yourself. What you think you…
Abbeville Institute 1
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October 28, 2025

Northern Noticing

The vindictive attacks on the South and her history are nothing new. For generations, Southerners have been chastised and ostracized by mainstream politics, media, and academia. For just as long, many Northerners have been convinced of Yankee lies and propaganda concerning the War for Southern Independence, its causes, and “Proposition Nation-Righteous Cause” puffery. This extended itself into all subsequent history…
Cole Branham 4
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October 27, 2025

Tennessee Johnson

Tennessee Johnson, DVD, directed by William Dieterle (1942; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, 2020). In the golden age of Hollywood, biographical dramas were a big draw at the box office. One that was not, however, was Tennessee Johnson, based on the life of Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States. These movies took some liberties with the…
Timothy A. Duskin 3
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October 24, 2025

Ain’t That America?

Just when it looked like things might be taking a more positive turn for Dixie with the restoration of the Reconciliation Monument in Arlington Cemetery, along come other events to remind us that hatred of the South has not waned much at all. Woke Leftist artists have created vile ‘re-imaginings’ out of once beautiful artwork honoring Southern heroes, mostly because…
Walt Garlington 11
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October 23, 2025

How Progressives Broke the Constitution and Praised Themselves For It

Originally published at Mises.org. In his article “Is the Constitution Broken beyond Repair?” David Gordon draws attention to a phenomenon that is often overlooked, namely, the great rejoicing among some constitutional lawyers over the fact that “to establish the new Constitution, Lincoln overthrew the first one… he replaced the old, immoral Constitution with a new one based on equality.” This…
Wanjiru Njoya 8
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October 22, 2025

Three Hundred Twenty-Two Pages: Jesse Stuart at Vanderbilt

Originally published at FolkChain.org. In early summer 1931, Jesse Stuart stood in the Greenup National Bank with empty pockets and a failed tobacco crop behind him. That spring he and his brother James had raised tobacco on a round knoll in W-Hollow, hoping to earn college money. Heavy rains came. The leaves went pale, then brown, then soft, then nothing.…
Chase Steely 10
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October 21, 2025

A Short History of the South, Part 2

Originally published at Reckonin.com We can only paint in very broad strokes a period that was marked by a vast expansion of the South and the U.S. in territory, population, economy, and culture. The Era of Expansion is an apt name. A major aspect of this period is the westward movement. New States admitted to the Union: 1790s: TN and…
Clyde Wilson 8
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October 20, 2025

Building Upon a Southern Ethnos Through True Faith

Delivered at the 3rd annual conference of the The Philip Ludwell III Orthodox Fellowship. The theme of our gathering today seems a hefty one, so I’m gonna take a stab at connecting the dots between some of those points and my particular focus, while always keeping in mind the Fellowship’s guiding mission as described by co-founder Clark Carlton: “to facilitate…
Dissident Mama 4
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October 17, 2025

The Humble Optimism of Robert E. Lee

There is much that has been and still can be said of General Lee’s character. It is probably to the benefit of all modern readers that we explore and attempt to understand Lee, as our own era has more frequently been concerned with deconstructing the past rather than holding up honorable men to emulate and admire. Following a brief perusal…
Justin Madura 13
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October 16, 2025

A Short History of the South, Part 1

Originally published at Reckonin.com Introduction There is a vast and often contradictory literature describing and explaining the South. Various theories have been put forth to describe Southern distinctiveness. We might note that the greater part of this literature is written by outsiders who have found the South to be a problem—either the South was evil or it had by some…
Clyde Wilson 5
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October 15, 2025

Confronting Stupidity: Bill O’Reilly vs. Nathan Bedford Forrest

I have read Chapter 5 of Mr. Bill O’Reilly and his co-author’s book, Confronting Evil: The Worst of the Worst. This chapter deals with Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Congratulations, gentlemen! You got almost every important fact wrong. First, the personal data. Forrest (who was called “Bedford”) was married, but he had only two children, although the authors were kind…
Samuel W. Mitcham 17
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October 14, 2025

A Tribute to Robert E. Lee

On this day (Oct. 12) marks the anniversary of the death of General Robert E. Lee CSA, Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. He graduated from West Point without a single demerit. He fought with high distinction & courage in The Mexican-American War. He served his nation as West Point Superintendent. Many of his cadets would go on to…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh 8
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October 13, 2025

Black Slaveholders: O, the Irony

A review of Larry A. McCluney, Jr., Paradox of Freedom: A History of Black Slaveholders in America (Scuppernong Press, 2025) While working several years ago, a Black friend informed me that she was taking her family to a reunion at a plantation in the Cane River area of Northwest Louisiana.  As a longtime resident of north Louisiana, I understood something…
Walter D. (Donnie) Kennedy 11
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October 10, 2025

Thomas and Randolph

Unsurprising it would be to find that many persons, decently familiar with Thomas Jefferson (and that includes Early American historians), were unaware that he had a brother. Biographers sometimes passingly mention Randolph early in a Jeffersonian biography inasmuch as Thomas, as the older brother, was saddled with the task of choosing between a tract of land on the Rivanna River…
M. Andrew Holowchak 0
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October 9, 2025

Why Murray Rothbard Supported the Southern Democrats

In paying tribute to the “genius, integrity, and courage” of Murray Rothbard, Clyde Wilson observed that “Murray is no longer with us in the flesh, but the fireball of his mind and spirit will be giving us light and energy deep into the 21st century.” This light shines forth from letters recently unearthed in a Pennsylvania warehouse by Daniel J.…
Wanjiru Njoya 6
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October 8, 2025

VMI’s “Struggle Session”

Nearly five years ago I entitled the first of several commentaries on my alma mater, “VMI Test Case for the Country.” The school was handed the gloriously soft-ballish opportunity to reject the neomarxist revolution ramped-up by George Floyd’s death. Based upon lies, deceptions, and historical ignorance, the movement reared its ugly head more brazenly than ever before in our country.…
Forrest L. Marion 18
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October 7, 2025

The Gift of Gab

Review of Randall Ivey, The Gift of Gab (Green Altar Books, 2024) Randall Ivey’s most recent collection of short stories is a welcome addition to his growing list of titles, and since four of the stories in The Gift of Gab were first published on the Abbeville website, many readers will already be familiar with his unique and wonderfully comic,…
Jack Trotter 1
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October 6, 2025

A Conservative Mindset

Radicalism has always been more popular than conservatism. Radicalism has the added side benefit of immediate gratification and a narrow focus born of heat. Conservatism on the other hand is seen as a vice in a day of tribulation. It is a detriment to the mind hardwired toward action, and immediate at that. Conservatism it has been said is poor…
Rev. Benjamin Glaser 3
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October 3, 2025

“Half the Truth is often a great Lie.”

Originally published at Reckonin.com After reading Clyde Wilson’s latest articles, “Hitler’s New Fans” and “The South and the ‘Alt-Right’” (and the comments), I must ride towards the sound of the guns! As a revisionist and as a “paleo-libertarian,” my view of the “Alt-Right” was that despite its vices it was a vital and youthful revolt against a “Gerontocratic Obsolete Party”/“Stupid…
James Rutledge Roesch 12
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October 2, 2025

Sam Francis and the Revolution from the Middle

Sam Francis is virtually unknown in American conservatism today. That wasn't always the case. Joseph Scotchie discusses his new book, Samuel T. Francis and the Revolution from the Middle. Get the book: https://a.co/d/0BVmube https://youtu.be/knU6B9M8KnU?si=6tuYs9yCUC6cFEfS    
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October 1, 2025

The Sorrow Singer

In the South, a funeral isn’t just a formality. It’s a moment when music becomes memory, and memory becomes something you can hum for the rest of your life. —Tom Daniel My memory puts on a coat of gray, A keening tweed that moans just like a choir, A dirge-like gabardine that knows the way Of tears, a worsted wool,…
Maura H. Harrison 6
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September 30, 2025

The Southern Conservative View of Equality

Originally published at Mises.org. “You just can’t attack Lincoln and get away with it—you just can’t.” Hearing these words, spoken in front of a portrait of Lincoln at the Rockford Institute in 1989, is my first memory of Mel Bradford. That remark, delivered in an accent characteristic of the Texas-Oklahoma border that was his home country, reflected the wounds of…
Wanjiru Njoya 4
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September 29, 2025

“A ferocious hate of the Southern white man”

Is Israel Jefferson’s 1873 Account of Jefferson’s Paternity of Sally Hemings’ Children Worthful or Worthless? It is commonplace for many Jeffersonian scholars, uncritically accepting Jefferson’s paternity of all of Sally Hemings’ children, to speak of slave Israel Gillette’s 1873 comments on Jefferson’s paternity as being corroborative or confirmatory evidence for that paternity—e.g., the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s account of Gillette’s published…
M. Andrew Holowchak 12
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September 26, 2025

American Foundings and the Future of Constitutionalism

Dr. Carey Roberts presents the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization’s (AHI)18th Annual David Aldrich Nelson Lecture in Constitutional Jurisprudence on Constitution Day, September 17, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SEQr6y43WA
Carey Roberts 0
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September 25, 2025

Lincoln’s Confusion Over Slavery and States’ Rights

“There is some difference of opinion whether this clause should be enforced by national or by State authority, but surely that difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done.” -Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address There is…
Jeb Smith 16
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September 24, 2025

Virginia First–A Review

Editor's Note: This review was originally published at the Independent Institute. We would like to thank Dr. Coclanis for his thorough and critical review of Virginia First: The 1607 Project The overhyped and tendentiously argued “1619 Project” (hereinafter 1619) was rolled out in vainglorious fashion by The New York Times in August 2019 (nytimes.com). Since the release of the first…
Peter A. Coclanis 1
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September 23, 2025

Hear, Hear for Shotwell!

When I was a young lad in graduate school, Clyde Wilson asked me and another graduate student to his office for a chat about American history. We didn't know what to expect, but he wanted to ask us a few questions. We walked in, Clyde pivoted around from his typewriter (he didn't have a computer in his office for the…
Brion McClanahan 9
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September 22, 2025

South Carolina was Not an Oligarchy

In the heated political rhetoric of the mid-19th century, Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) famously lambasted South Carolina's government in his 1856 speech "The Crime Against Kansas," portraying it as an oligarchy where political power was confined to an elite few, specifically requiring legislators to own "a settled freehold estate and ten negroes." This claim, however, was a deliberate distortion of…
Abbeville Institute 2
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September 19, 2025

Emancipation as a War Measure

Although not an “abolitionist” in the strict sense, Abraham Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery. Lincoln’s view was common within the Republican Party. Abolitionists were generally despised in both North and South--many would be considered radical even by today’s abysmal moral standards. Abolitionists, e.g., Wendell Phillips and Lysander Spooner routinely criticized Lincoln for his tepid anti-slavery views. Lincoln’s focus was…
John M. Taylor 4
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September 18, 2025

Reunion with the Dead

Hey, there!  Hey!  I remember you!  You Will McMillan, ain’t you?  That’s right.  Me and you went to Compton High together.  But you probably don’t remember me.  We wasn’t close or nothing.  Knew each other to say hey when passing, but that’s about all.  You was a brain.  Always had your face in a book.  Always reading and studying.  Not…
Randall Ivey 2
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September 17, 2025

Calhoun, Reagan, and States’ Rights

Not long ago, California governor Gavin Newsom condemned President Trump's nationalization of California's National Guard units, characterizing it as an attempt “to usurp state authority and resources.”  Newsom went on to accuse Trump of “inflaming fear in the community, inciting fear and violence, and endangering state sovereignty.”  While nationalist-leaning conservatives are quick to compare the governor to Jefferson Davis, the…
Jerry Salyer 3
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September 16, 2025

Why Did Jefferson Write the Notes on the State of Virginia?

Thomas Jefferson in his 1821 never-finished autobiography, writes of the motivation for and the history behind his only book Notes on Virginia: Before I had left America, that is to say in the year 1781. I had received a letter from M. de Marbois, of the French legation in Philadelphia, informing me he had been instructed by his government to…
M. Andrew Holowchak 0
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September 15, 2025

Reply to MAGA: MAHAHAHA!

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?  Mark 8:36 On July 23, 2023 Donald Trump addressed the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Summit in Washington, D.C., delivering his AI action plan including these words (here starting about 21:35): We also have to have a single federal standard not 50 different states…
Mike Goodloe 13
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September 12, 2025

Louisiana Landscapes in True Detective

Modern cinema has rarely surprised in recent years. However, there are some exceptions that still save the reputation of contemporary productions and tv series. In my opinion, the first season of True Detective can certainly be considered a near-masterpiece. The creator of the series is Nic Pizzolatto, a New Orleans-born (1975) writer and film producer. I will try not to…
Karol Mazur 1
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September 11, 2025

The South and the “Alt-Right”

Originally posted at Reckonin.com My last post (Hitler’s New Fans) has received a fair amount of comment, mostly negative. Some have questioned why I addressed the subject? Because I thought someone needed to take notice of an unfortunate trend. I have no quarrel with the Alternative Right as long as it is attacking the evil Yankee Empire. But to bring…
Clyde Wilson 10
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September 10, 2025

Irrelevant Congresses and Caesar-Presidents

The powers of the federal executive have been growing steadily in the United States since Lincoln’s War, which destroyed the limited, coordinating government that had existed in DC up to his time in office and replaced it with a powerful, centralized entity that could stomp upon the States with impunity.  Proof of this may be seen in the numbers of…
Walt Garlington 5
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September 9, 2025

When They Repealed the 13th Amendment

There is probably nothing as unrecognized and consequently misunderstood as the concept of slavery, at least as to the presentation by modernity media and so-called historical presenters. Slavery has been around since the beginning of man’s history and has been a force in commerce as well as crime throughout the known and explored world. If H.G. Wells’s somewhat well-structured Outline…
Paul H. Yarbrough 11
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September 8, 2025

A Great Southern Poet of the 20th Century

“My mother had five sweet normal wholesome children; then I was born.” The poet Archibald Rutledge smiled when he said this, but he was indeed a precocious child, and so not really “normal.” When he was only three years old, he told his mother that he had “made a poem.” I saw a little rattlesnake too young to make his…
Karen Stokes 3
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September 5, 2025

Thomas Jefferson’s West Point

Thomas Jefferson has been depicted by many scholars as a pacifist, and a “conciliatorian”: that is, person adverse to conflict to solve problems and issues. He was a strict supporter of limited government and a militia, not a standing army, to defend and protect the country and to preserve liberty for the people. Yet he also birthed West Point Military…
George Gori 3
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September 4, 2025

Hitler’s New Fans?

Originally published at Reckonin.com. It is natural and good that we revise our interpretations of past history now and then in the light of new evidence and the emergence of new perspectives on human affairs. But there seems to be going on at the moment a revisionism about World War II that is somewhat distorted in judging good and evil.…
Clyde Wilson 19
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September 3, 2025

The Drawl and the Song

At a recent Abbeville Conference, I tackled a subject that’s been hiding in plain sight all along - the Southern accent. I’ve lived in Alabama almost my whole life, so I’m definitely familiar with the Southern accent. Now it’s true that my wife and I lived in Iowa for three years, but we actually kind of liked it up there.…
Tom Daniel 8
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September 2, 2025

Real American Conservatism

For the past week, Dinesh D’Souza has engaged in an ongoing debate on social media concerning the meaning of American conservatism and the influence of the South in American history. D’Souza—like Victor Davis Hanson, Harry Jaffa, Larry Arnn, Allen Guelzo, and a host of other mainstream conservatives—argue that while Robert E. Lee has admirable traits, the South cannot be integrated…
Brion McClanahan 11
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August 29, 2025

Notable Trees in Alabama

This piece was originally published in 1931 in the Montgomery Advertiser. God willed that even trees should have an individuality. In the world's history, there is the "Charter Oak" and there was the “Washington Elm,” and in Athens, Ga., a tree has a deed to its own plot of ground. Most of us have heard of the “Cedars of Lebanon,”…
Peter A. Brannon 1
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August 28, 2025

Lafayette at Monticello

President James Monroe in 1824 invited the Marquis de Lafayette, an enormous French figure in the American and French Revolutions, to visit the United States after decades abroad in France. Lafayette agreed to visit and the visit would last over a year, from August 15, 1824, to September 3, 1825. Jefferson invited the great Frenchman to pay him a visit.…
M. Andrew Holowchak 2
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August 27, 2025

Remembering Hipolit Oladowski and others

One of the most interesting research interests for me is exploring the connections between Poles and the American South. Research-wise, this is undoubtedly a niche area and, despite everything, under-researched, primarily due to the difficulty in accessing sources: letters, notes, and diaries. This niche topic of Polish-American history, however, seems so fascinating that it constitutes a treasure trove of mysteries.…
Karol Mazur 2
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August 26, 2025

The Double Standards of Court Historians in War and Reconstruction

Originally published at Mises.org In his book Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, the Marxist historian Eric Foner advances a revisionist history of the Reconstruction Era. In his preface, he explains why revisionist history is important: Revising interpretations of the past is intrinsic to the study of history… Since the early 1960s, a profound alteration of the place of blacks within…
Wanjiru Njoya 8
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August 25, 2025

State Sovereignty?

The United States of America, bases its legal argument of national union, and national sovereignty over the individual states; on the  premise that the individual states were never individually sovereign nations unto themselves, and that they united to form a sovereign nation or federal state. However,  investigation reveals that the individual states were indeed founded as (thirteen) fully separate sovereign nations,…
Brian McCandliss 5
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August 22, 2025

Would States’ Rights Solve our Issues?

I have been a big advocate for decentralized power, which in our American context has been connected to “states' rights;” the most prominent period and example being the American Civil War, where the Southern states resisted centralized federal control and both fought for and applied to their Constitution a strong decentralized states' rights policy. A decentralized Union where sovereignty lay…
Jeb Smith 19
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August 21, 2025

Debunking Lies and Half-Truths–The Confederate Flag

THEY SAY: “The flag we now call the Confederate battle flag was one of many battle flags used by the Confederate forces during the Civil War.  It largely disappeared after the war and was not commonly seen again until the 1950s, when white supremacists resurrected it as a clear symbol of their opposition to integration and the Civil Rights Movement. …
Lola Sanchez 6
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August 20, 2025

Oh Donald, Where Art Thou?

A while back I wrote that I would really believe in Donald Trump when I saw the Arlington reconciliation monument go back up. Almost hard to believe, but it looks like it’s happening. It seems also that immigration is being seriously addressed, and I am happy about that too! Although I fear it is far too late to repair the…
Clyde Wilson 2
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August 19, 2025

Transforming the Union

Lincoln claimed the North was fighting to preserve the Union. However, fighting to preserve a voluntary Union is a contradiction since force is antithetical to voluntary consent. Alexander Hamilton noted: “To coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised…Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only…
John M. Taylor 7
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August 18, 2025

Debunking Kevin Levin’s Distorted Assault on the Reconciliation Memorial

Kevin Levin's recent Substack screed, "Stop Referring to the Confederate Monument in Arlington National Cemetery as a 'Reconciliation Monument,'" is a masterclass in selective historical cherry-picking, ideological bias, and outright fabrication. Levin, a self-styled Civil War memory expert whose work has been accused of perpetuating an anti-Southern narrative that borders on hostility, peddles the absurd notion that the Arlington Confederate…
Abbeville Institute 6
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August 15, 2025

The Genius of Thomas Jefferson

The question “Was Thomas Jefferson a genius?” might seem awkward to anyone who has spent any time studying Jefferson, for it admits an obvious answer: He was. I have consistently maintained that he was one of the most gifted thinkers of his day—“gifted” because of his Edison-like penchant for and persistency at hard study and hard work. He had an…
M. Andrew Holowchak 6
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August 14, 2025

The Religion of Americanism

Mr. Joe Haines recently wrote an excellent essay for the Abbeville Institute detailing President Lincoln’s destruction of the voluntary union of free States and his creation of a new, indissoluble, and unitary nation from the wreckage.  We hope folks will read it if they haven’t already. It is a well-constructed essay in its historical and political aspects, and yet there…
Walt Garlington 6
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August 13, 2025

Who was Albert Pike?

During the past week the federal government announced that two removed Confederate memorials will be returned. The bigger one is Arlington's "Reconciliation Monument" erected in 1914 and removed in 2023. In 2027 it will be returned on a fifty-year loan from Virginia where it has been stored since 2023. The second one is a statue of Albert Pike erected in…
Philip Leigh 5
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August 12, 2025

The Gettysburg Redress

I am not a "Lincoln Scholar." And I will fight any man who accuses me of being one. Not that being a Lincoln Scholar isn't good business. Thanks to these folks, who recycle the Lincoln myths like a perpetual motion machine, Lincoln is surpassed by only Jesus Christ in our national pantheon of deities. Challenging the Lincoln myth is viewed…
Joe Haines 17
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August 11, 2025

Blood in the Branches

This is a true story where music, memory, and mass murder meet beneath the Southern sky. I’ve said before that my family tree may have tangled roots, but this time, it’s got blood in the branches. I want to tell you a story that winds through the bare winter trees of Stokes County, North Carolina… a story that runs like…
Tom Daniel 2
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August 8, 2025

Debunking Myths: The True Story Behind Charlottesville’s Lee Statue

Originally published as an essay on X by the "Jefferson Davis" account. In the wake of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, activists and some "historians" propagated a series of claims about the city's Robert E. Lee statue, framing it as a symbol of white supremacy, Jim Crow, and racial intimidation. These narratives often distorted historical facts,…
Abbeville Institute 4
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August 7, 2025

Victory at Arlington

On Tuesday, August 5, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared that the Arlington "Reconciliation Monument" was going home. By 2027, the beautiful sculpture dedicated to turning "swords into plowshares" and healing the wounds of war will be placed back in the cemetery. It should never have been removed. Last time I checked, Arlington is a cemetery, and as per…
Brion McClanahan 13
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August 6, 2025

The Sabbath and Slavery

No topic of importance in the Old South may be handled rightly without dealing with the Peculiar Institution, slavery. The holy Sabbath was no exception. Embedded in the Ten Commandments, the fourth commandment (according to Protestant enumeration) – to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy – called for a weekly day of public worship and rest from secular…
Forrest L. Marion 4
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August 5, 2025

Lincoln’s Counterfeiters

Review of Lincoln’s Counterfeiters: The Wisconsin Gang that Funded the Union and Started the Chicago Mob (History Press, 2025) by Andrea Nolen. In the late 19th century and through the 20th there was a widespread impression that the Democratic Party operated corrupt big city machines and the Republican politicians were respectably sober and honest. ​This author makes clear, chapter and…
Clyde Wilson 1
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August 4, 2025

Legends of Southern Radio

Imagine a world where radio wasn’t just background noise, but was a powerful force across an entire region of the country. I want to look into the dusty dials and glowing tubes of early Southern radio, and explore all about some of the stations that didn’t just play music, but changed culture, identity, and race relations in the American South…
Tom Daniel 4
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August 1, 2025

The Kingfish

“Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.” With that slogan Huey Pierce Long Jr. promised to dynamite America’s caste system and pave the rubble with schools, hospitals, and paved highways. To his enemies he was a bayou Mussolini; to his followers he was the first man in living memory who kept the lights on in forgotten parishes. Strip…
John Slaughter 9
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July 31, 2025

Are you a Confederate but Don’t Know It?

Most of the political problems in this country won’t be settled until more folks realize the South was right. I know that goes against the P.C. edicts, but the fact is that on the subject of the constitutional republic, the Confederate leaders were right and the Northern Republicans were wrong. Many people today even argue the Confederate positions without realizing…
Charley Reese 10
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July 30, 2025

Havin’ A Large Time

Reporter Bill King discusses his decade of work covering the Southern music scene from 1976-1986. We're havin' a large time. You can pick up his book, Large Time: On the Southern Music Beat, 1976-1986, and enjoy more detailed stories. https://youtu.be/cxMqZTfhqSM The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.
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July 29, 2025

Music and the Soul

Originally published at Reckonin.com Most of the music we hear in modern life is of the pre-recorded sort, mass produced by corporations. One might argue that the large-scale production and distribution of music has some upsides - we can experience a wider variety of musical styles, and the work of the most talented artists can be appreciated by everyone regardless…
Anne Wilson Smith 2
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July 28, 2025

Jefferson on Constitutions

Political institutions not exact systems as are geometrical “systems” such as Euclidean geometry and its alternatives, Lobachevskian (hyperbolic) and Riemannian (elliptical) geometries. Hence, the principles of any constitution cannot be taken, as they often are, as axiomata as they are in geometries. They are, however, philosophically based: both on the nature of humans and the best life for humans, given…
M. Andrew Holowchak 2
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July 25, 2025

This Night is My Departing Night for Here No Longer May I Stay: The Celtic South

Originally published at A Memoir of the Occupation. At the summit of ancient Irish literature stands Táin Bó Cúailnge, or The Cattle Raid of Cooley. It is the story of Queen Medh of Connacht and Cúchulainn, mightiest of the Knights of the Red Branch sworn to the service of King Conchobar of Ulster, and the war they fought over the…
Enoch Cade 2
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July 24, 2025

Understanding the Doctrine of State’s Rights

Originally published at Mises.org One hundred sixty years after the war for Southern independence, great confusion is still caused by the claim that the South fought for their independence and for “states’ rights.” What does the doctrine of “states’ rights” mean in this context? The dictionary definition is easily understood: “the rights and powers held by individual US states rather…
Wanjiru Njoya 7
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July 23, 2025

Southern Food and Family

You might be Southern if you think a salad means something held together by Cool Whip. In the South, we don’t just eat meals. We remember. We gather. We keep our people’s memories alive one bite at a time. As a big man that loves to eat, I’m concerned that we don’t talk nearly enough about Southern food. Every Abbeville…
Tom Daniel 8
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July 22, 2025

The Darkening of the American Mind

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Isaiah 5:20 Tucker Carlson recently conducted an interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the representative of the 14th congressional district of Georgia, in the context of the bombing by United States forces of…
Mike Goodloe 10
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July 21, 2025

The Long Gray Line

“The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray (my emphasis), would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.” Douglas MacArthur. General Douglas MacArthur gave his final speech (amazingly extemporaneous) to the Corps of Cadets at West point…
Paul H. Yarbrough 12
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July 18, 2025

“Angry White Southern Men”?

In June, the Washington Post published an extended article on an ongoing dispute in Edenton, North Carolina, over a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier erected in 1902 to honor the 47 war dead of Chowan County. Every weekend, the article explained, pro-statue and anti-statute locals offer their respective cases in favor of either keeping the statue in its prominent…
Casey Chalk 13
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July 17, 2025

Did Lee Whip His Slaves?

Notwithstanding currently popular interpretations, there is no convincing evidence that Robert E. Lee ever whipped slaves. The argument that he ordered the flogging of three runaways in 1859 took on a new life after Elizabeth Brown Pryor published Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters in 2007. Contrary to her implications, she provides no…
Philip Leigh 9
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July 16, 2025

Icon

A review of Icon (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2017) by Georgia Briggs Today, my friends, we owe a debt of gratitude to the wonderful Matushka Emma Cazabonne for recommending I read a relatively new novel by a talented young Southern author. (Thanks, Emma!) The book is a new take on an old story, or, rather, an old and persistent threat to civilizational states,…
Perrin Lovett 0
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July 15, 2025

Flying Dixie’s Flag on the 4th of July

It is unsurprising to see the United States flag flying on the 4th of July.  It is the day of the colonies’/States’ separation from Great Britain, and the beginning of their existence as countries on an equal footing with the others of the world. And yet something is missing.  The Southern cultural element that should be present in Louisiana and…
Walt Garlington 6
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July 14, 2025

Music and Mourning: Funeral Traditions of the South

Southern funerals. There’s nothing like them anywhere in the world. They are a unique blend of faith, reverence, tradition, and music, and Southern funerals and burials have been tremendously shaped by song. Whether it’s the keening moan of a gospel choir, the slow march of a brass band, or a lone fiddle crying out over a pine box, music has…
Tom Daniel 5
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July 11, 2025

It Ain’t the Heat, It’s the Humidity (And Also the Heat)

Back when I was a boy, summers in the South were hot, sure—but they were respectable about it. The heat came on slow, like a gentleman tipping his hat, and gave you a chance to get your chores done before it got truly miserable. You’d break a sweat by noon, but nothing a tall glass of sweet tea and a…
Bubba "Don't Call Me Junior" McGraw 4
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July 10, 2025

The “Egghead” Got it Right

The Democratic Party nominated Adlai Stevenson for President of the United States twice, once in 1952 and again in 1956. He is often described as a sacrificial lamb, cannon fodder for Dwight Eisenhower in a contest of David and Goliath, except in this case, Goliath won. Stevenson never fared well with the press and could not capture the popular imagination…
Brion McClanahan 6
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July 9, 2025

Joint Salvation

South Carolina author Perrin Lovett’s recent Christian novel Judging Athena (Shotwell Publishing) has attracted international attention. Below, Lovett is interviewed about the book. This interview/review was originally published at LiteraryTitan.com Judging Athena follows a humble and kindhearted research assistant who meets a curator at an art gallery, and what begins as a chance encounter over a necklace for a young…
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July 8, 2025

Oswald Spengler and the Confederacy

The Southern land bled a rhythm no industrial algorithm can measure, its tempo measured through cotton fields and porch sermons, chivalry rising from the soil like heat. Spengler didn’t merely observe. It was divination, reading omens in the shadow of collapsing empires. The Confederacy became for him a form, sculpted not from policy or party but from blood memory and…
Constantin von Hoffmeister 3
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July 7, 2025

Jefferson’s Declaration

On June 9, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed a committee of five men—Virginian Thomas Jefferson, New Englander John Adams, Pennsylvanian Benjamin Franklin, New Yorker Robert Livingston, and New Englander Roger Sherman—to draft a declaration of American independence. The motivation for the document—the one given to the committee by the Congress—is certainly conveyed in the opening salvo of Jefferson’s draft: to…
M. Andrew Holowchak 2
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July 4, 2025

What are We Celebrating on July 4?

On July 4, Americans will have a day of celebration with cookouts, parades, and fireworks.  Yet how many really understand just what we are celebrating?  Why is there a Pride Month but not an American Patriotism Month? What was actually the purpose of the Declaration of Independence?  What specifically did it state?  Why do our unalienable freedoms that were enshrined…
Carole Hornsby Haynes 13
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July 3, 2025

The New York Draft Riots

The June 2025 Los Angeles riots have initiated constitutional questions about State vs. Federal authority. Per Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, it is up to the Governor or legislature of a State to request federal assistance; otherwise, the general government can enforce federal laws but generally has no authority to interfere with State affairs. Furthermore, the 1878…
John M. Taylor 5
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July 2, 2025

Gettysburg

One personal annual tradition I have is to watch the classic war film Gettysburg.  I have been a Civil War buff for longer than I can remember, so long that I don’t remember when my interest started.  One of the first books I remember reading was Mary Williamson’s Confederate Trilogy for Young Readers, published by the (sadly) now defunct Sprinkle…
Samuel Ashwood 6
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July 1, 2025

The Disappearing South

There is a peculiar stillness in the late afternoon air of the South, a pause that speaks not only to the settling heat but to a deeper, more troubling quiet. It is the silence of a culture slowly slipping beyond reach, not through violence or sudden upheaval, but rather by the gentle erosion wrought by time, change, and migration. As…
Gabriel Ward 17
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June 30, 2025

Immigration and State Sovereignty

On a recent episode of The War Room (here) with Stephen K. Bannon the following exchange between Bannon and Mike Davis of the Article III Project took place.  Davis is a constitutional lawyer and a very active and successful supporter of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, as is Bannon.  The segment reference runs from 16:25 to 17:50 (transcript taken…
Mike Goodloe 2
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June 27, 2025

Where are Your People Buried?

“Where y’all from” once meant “where are your people buried?” Buried, in turn, implies place, a postage-stamp of sod or swamp or forest, a landscape secured by name, by generations, by labor and blood and memory. That, as we know, is unacceptable for a polity predicated the free flow of capital and labor. “Local attachment,” much less “familial,” interferes with…
Enoch Cade 3
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June 26, 2025

Realism and Hope: Overcoming the Distorted Past in the Works of Faulkner

Introduction In 1942, William Faulkner brought an end to the peak of his writing career when he published the short story cycle Go Down, Moses. His peak began thirteen years earlier in 1928 when he began writing The Sound and the Fury, the novel which earned him a place among the top writers of the time. Renowned Faulkner critic André…
John Walker 2
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June 25, 2025

Institutionalized Wokism as the Norm in Jeffersonian Scholarship

Abbeville Institute Press recently (2025) published my book--Sally Hemings, Race, and Song-and-Dance Historiography: The Corruption of Jefferson Scholarship by Institutional Wokeism. The book has 24 short, easily digestible essays—inasmuch as my writings can be construed as easily digestible!—in  three sections. I proffer some comments on why I wrote the book. In the introduction I define “wokeism” roughly as “being awake…
M. Andrew Holowchak 7
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June 24, 2025

Reconciliation in Frontier Film

Several weeks ago, I read The Cavalry Trilogy by Michael F. Blake. This short book covers the history of three John Ford Westerns, each starring John Wayne as a cavalry officer in the 1870s and 1880s. All three Westerns, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950) feature beautiful shots of the southwestern desert, cavalry…
Vaugh Sullivan 3
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June 23, 2025

George Wallace Reconsidered

This piece was originally published at The Old South Repository. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Those six words, burned into every high-school textbook, reduce George C. Wallace to a cartoon villain. They hide the inconvenient reality that the same man paved Alabama’s roads, built her community colleges, raised teacher salaries, and, in the twilight of his career, asked forgiveness…
John Slaughter 10
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June 20, 2025

“I Cannot Live Without Books”

“I cannot live without books,” Jefferson confides in a letter to John Adams (10 June 1815). The statement today is well-known and readily available on coffee mugs, book bags, and tee-shirts, for anyone willing to pay an inflated price. What is seldom recognized is that the statement is part of a larger sentence, which continues concessively, “but fewer will suffice…
M. Andrew Holowchak 3
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June 19, 2025

Immigration and the States

As with most departures from prescribed constitutional procedure the immigration process has over the years resulted in disaster after disaster.  The current flare-up in this area is no exception.  Several states which have long claimed to be “sanctuaries” for undocumented persons residing within the boundaries of the United States have indicated that they will not cooperate with the Trump administrations’s…
Mike Goodloe 7
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June 18, 2025

Trump the Nominalist

In Dixieland, ‘nominalism’ is a dirty word.  This is because, as Richard Weaver noticed, it is an act of aggression against creatures and things of all kinds in the world, removing any notion of a fixed meaning and nature from them and imposing new ones on a whim.  Nominalism is ‘the notion that nature has no essential independence or meaning.’ …
Walt Garlington 11
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June 17, 2025

The Republican War Machine Never Dies

The escalating conflict between Israel and Iran has Americans debating the future of a "conservative" American foreign policy. President Trump campaigned on a promise to keep the United States out of World War III while creating a solution to international problems in Ukraine and the Middle East. He blustered that Europe should be forced to pay for the upkeep of…
Brion McClanahan 8
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June 16, 2025

Government, of the People…That’s a Riot!

The unrest and riots in California have been underwritten by the clods of political planning such as California’s own governor, the useless idiot Gavin Newsom, who blows hard with demands that Donald Trump arrest him. Newsom, of course, wants confrontation for political gains from the glory hallelujah Democratic party. Arm in arm with the girly-screamer Mayor Karen Bass they could…
Paul H. Yarbrough 11
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June 13, 2025

Secession: The Inalienable Right of a Free People to Leave a Tyrannical Union

In the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” When that consent is withdrawn—when the government becomes the destroyer, rather than the protector, of life, liberty, and property—then the people retain the right, indeed the duty, to dissolve the political bands which have connected them…
Joe Wolverton 14
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June 12, 2025

A Stately Symposium

Thomas Jefferson received a singular letter, he wrote in his Autobiography, on July 20, 1789. The writer, Champion de Cicé, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, was the chairman of a committee for the construction of a constitution for a new French government and he asked Jefferson to be present concerning their deliberations on a constitution. Jefferson excused himself. His role, he…
M. Andrew Holowchak 1
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June 11, 2025

James Kibler and Southern Literature

James E. Kibler, Beyond the Stone: Poems of Tribute and Remembrance. Shotwell Publishing, 2025. The publication of James Kibler’s second book of verse is more than just another book. It is an event in Southern culture, a hallmark in Kibler’s career as a consummate man of letters. A consummate man of letters describes a writer who does outstanding work in…
Clyde Wilson 1
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June 10, 2025

A Woman Rice Planter’s Story of Love and Faith

Elizabeth Allston Pringle was one of the most famous Southern authors of the early twentieth century, best known for her books A Woman Rice Planter, published in 1913, and Chronicles of Chicora Wood, published posthumously in 1922. Born in 1845, she was the daughter of Robert F. W. Allston, a gentleman rice planter of Georgetown District, South Carolina. In 1870…
Karen Stokes 2
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June 9, 2025

The Southern Cause: What Led to Secession

Originally published at Mises.org It is correct, analytically and logically, to distinguish secession from war. Many states secede peacefully, and it does not logically follow that secession must occasion war. The Southern states of America seceded peacefully, and Lincoln’s subsequent war which followed four months after secession was entirely unnecessary. Hence, Murray Rothbard wrote in his memo to the Volker…
Wanjiru Njoya 8
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June 6, 2025

The World the Slaveholders Made

A Review of Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (Vintage Books, 1971). European history is replete with examples of anti-capitalist sentiment on the political right. Nineteenth-century opponents of the market economy and bourgeois mores in Great Britain and on the Continent squarely blamed the decline of tradition, community, and natural hierarchy on the Industrial Revolution. The reduction of…
Grant Havers 2
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June 5, 2025

A Slimy Turn of Events at Monticello

When Dan Jordan left the presidency of Monticello in 2008, the job was gifted to Leslie Greene Bowman (MA, history, University of Delaware). Prior to Monticello, Bowman oversaw Winterthur, a historic house in northern Delaware. During her tenure at Monticello, Bowman created a new visitor center, opened the upstairs of Monticello which was long closed to visitors due to its…
M. Andrew Holowchak 3
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June 4, 2025

A Southern Solution to the Plastic Waste Problem

I. Problems Caused by Plastics Increasing Rapidly Plastic has brought beneficial improvements to many areas of life, from health care to household appliances.  However, the negative effects of its ubiquitousness around the world are also making themselves known. The amount of plastic produced each year has grown from 20 million tons (Mt) in 1966 to 460 Mt in 2019.  This…
Walt Garlington 2
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June 3, 2025

The Real Significance of June in American History

If you follow any American progressive corporate media account, you know that June is “Pride Month,” a ritual celebration of the “LGBTQ+” community for the secular Puritans. They selected June because of the “Stonewall Uprising”—no, not that “Stonewall”—a series of protests that popped up following a New York City police gay bar raid in June 1969. This distracts from the…
Brion McClanahan 4
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June 2, 2025

Hurrah for Political Chaos!

Originally published at Reckonin.com It is not easy to find out what is going on in Washington these days. That is partly due to Donald Trump’s style - many initiatives and gambits, loudly and provocatively presented. Some of these, like the tariff business, are obviously maneuvering for position; others are serious. This is wonderful and Trump is doing great service…
Clyde Wilson 21
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Patrick HenryBlog
May 30, 2025

Why not “We the States”?

Editor's Note: Henry delivered this speech in June, 1788 at the opening of the Virginia Ratifying Convention and is reprinted here in honor of his birthday, May 29. EXTRACT FROM SPEECH ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. THE preamble and the two first sections of the first article of the constitution being under consideration, Mr. Henry thus addressed the convention: MR. CHAIRMAN:…
Abbeville Institute 5
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May 29, 2025

Hubris

Serious studies of the causes of both the American Revolution and the later “Civil War” (sic) must produce the conclusion among scholars that one cannot truly understand the second “civil war” that took place in the middle of the 19th Century without an in-depth understanding of the causes of the first civil war that took place at the end of…
Valerie Protopapas 3
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May 28, 2025

Beyond the Stone

A Review Beyond The Stone: Poems of Praise and Remembrance (Green Altar Books, 2025) by James Everett Kibler It wouldn’t be difficult to ridicule the poetry gathered in this volume—that is, if one had no sympathy for traditionalist, formal poetics, especially poetry embedded in Southern tradition and sensibility. A hostile critic might suggest that Jim Kibler dwells in world suffused…
Jack Trotter 3
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May 27, 2025

The Destruction of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation

In 1985, Daniel Jordan—a Ph.D. in history from University of Virginia—became president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and runs Monticello. He would preside over Monticello for the next 24 years, during which time Thomas Jefferson’s life and legacy would be radically transformed through information made readily available by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Under his guidance, TJF created a…
M. Andrew Holowchak 6
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May 26, 2025

White Sulphur Manifesto

Editor's note: In 1868, former Union General William Rosecrans approached Robert E. Lee about making a statement in support of the Democratic ticket for the 1868 presidential election. The Republicans stirred fear among the Northern electorate that a Democratic victory would destroy race relations and subject black Southerners to harsh treatment at the hands of their former masters. This was…
Abbeville Institute 8
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May 23, 2025

Trump’s Crusade to Rewrite History

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. - St. John 8:32 Mr. Marc H. Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, writes that “The history of enslavement, segregation and discrimination in the United States traditionally has been seen as a Southern story.” This has been true ever since Reconstruction, for, as the…
H.V. Traywick, Jr. 10
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May 22, 2025

Nottoway

The South lost another cultural jewel. On May 15, Nottoway, the largest antebellum plantation home in the South, burned to the ground. The fire reportedly started in one of the second story bedrooms, but the cause of the blaze is still under investigation. And while it appears to be an accidental electrical fire, in our current political climate, arson can…
Brion McClanahan 9
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May 21, 2025

Abolitionist Hypocrisies

Originally published at Mises.org. Lysander Spooner is well known as an abolitionist who argued that slavery was a violation of natural law. In his 1858 pamphlet, “A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, and To the Non-Slaveholders of the South,” Spooner set out what he considered to be the relevant “principles of justice and humanity,” arguing that “so long as…
Wanjiru Njoya 7
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May 20, 2025

Did Lincoln Deliberately Provoke War and Why?

It’s pretty well known that strong evidence exists from Lincoln’s own pen that he deliberately sent the resupply ships to Ft. Sumter to provoke war. Gustavus V. Fox was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy who oversaw the “rescue fleet” for Fort Sumter. Abraham Lincoln had provoked his war and was pleased but "concerned that Gustavus Fox, was depressed that…
Rod O'Barr 17
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May 19, 2025

Christian Nationalism and Country Music

These days some people are talking up “Christian nationalism.” It is not clear to me what Christ and nationalism have to do with each other. The New Testament, unlike the Old, strikes me as a message of liberation from nationalism. It’s true that America began as a Christian society and remained so until fairly recent times. However, our Founders did…
Clyde Wilson 18
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May 16, 2025

M.E. Bradford: In Memoriam

Originally published in the Fourth Quarter 1992 edition of Southern Partisan. I’m always amazed at how wisely good people face death, how perfectly they focus their attention at the end. 1 got a call from Mel Bradford the night before he was to undergo open-heart surgery; and we talked for a few minutes about the huge number of these operations…
Thomas Landess 3
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May 15, 2025

Reconstructed But Unregenerate

From I'll Take My Stand (1930) It is out of fashion in these days to look backward rather than forward. About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living. He is punished as his crime deserves. He feels himself in…
John Crowe Ransom 4
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May 14, 2025

To Free or Not to Free

It is often acknowledged that Jefferson did much in his years prior to his retirement from political activity to try to eradicate the institution of slavery. Writes Gilbert Chinard in Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism: “No New Englander had done more to promote the cause of abolition than Jefferson; on two occasions he had proposed legislative measures to put…
M. Andrew Holowchak 1
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May 13, 2025

On the Settling of North Louisiana: The Yeoman Farmers

Section iv of The Dwelling Place I have not changed any of my views on Agrarianism since the appearance of I’ll Take My Stand . . . . I never thought of Agrarianism as a restoration of anything in the Old South; I saw it as something to be created, as I think it will be in the long run…
David Middleton 1
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May 12, 2025

John MacRae: The Highland Bard of North Carolina

Editor's Note: Due to the formatting of this text, it was easier to publish this as a PDF "book". Enjoy! The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.
J. Shaw Gillis 1
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May 9, 2025

Springtime of Renewal in Serbia, but What of Dixie?

The European Christian country of Serbia may be considered something of a sister of Dixie’s.  Both peoples have followed similar paths:  After attaining a solid Christian identity and unity, both faced an horrible cataclysm:  The Serbs were conquered by the Muslim Turks in the 14th century and remained their vassals until the 19th century; the South was subjugated to the…
Walt Garlington 0
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May 8, 2025

The Wide Awakes

Originally published at the Alabama Gazette. C-Span recently featured John Grinspan speaking about the Wide Awakes, a topic covered on the Abbeville Blog and in Chapter Seven of my book, Union At All Costs: From Confederation to Consolidation. As early as 1856, numerous paramilitary clubs were organized in support of the Republican Party. Examples included the Rocky Mountain Clubs, Freedom…
John M. Taylor 5
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May 7, 2025

What the Confederate Constitution Got Right

In today’s hypersensitive society, saying anything nice about the South, and especially the Confederacy, could very well be a death sentence in many job fields, not to mention academia. The clowns of “cancel culture” will be out in force. This should come as a shock to no one, for the South has always had to defend itself, first in the…
Ryan Walters 11
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May 6, 2025

Building Conservatism

"I have never subscribed to the idea, apparently held by some, that conservatism is only a brake on somebody else's engine. Such persons seem to think that a conservative has done his job when he has issued a warning against going too fast." -- Richard Weaver, In Defense of Tradition (The Prospects of Conservatism). Recently I’ve began to read a…
Rev. Benjamin Glaser 7
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May 5, 2025

I Wish I Was in the Land of Cotton…

Recently someone posted on Facebook that they had recently purchased a DVD copy of the 1948 picture-show (“picture show” being Southern for the Yankee appellation “movie”) Song of the South. SS being the award-winning partial animation of tales written in the 19th Century by Joel Chandlor Harris about animal characters and their personification of Southerners. Probably Southerners from Georgia, since…
Paul H. Yarbrough 10
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May 2, 2025

How Does Trump Measure up to Jefferson’s Essential Principles of Republicanism

In a prior essay, I covered a comparison of Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump on presidential power. The discussion was more theoretical, than practical. In this essay, I compare the two US presidents from the perspective not of how each thought about presidential power, but of how each exercised that power. His First Inaugural Address (1801) is without question one…
M. Andrew Holowchak 0
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May 1, 2025

The Sede Vacante of Southern Tradition

Pope Francis was, at most, a peripheral figure in the story of the South.  Though the leader of the world’s largest Christian denomination, his influence has largely remained on the Catholic fringes of our cultural sphere – Texas, Cajun country, Florida, Maryland, Savannah, and in pockets of many of our larger cities.  I primarily heard about Pope Francis and his…
J. Shaw Gillis 9
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April 30, 2025

The Union League and Radical Reconstruction

Eric Foner, who has been described as a “noted Marxist historian”, observes that “there exists more than one legitimate way of recounting past events.” His own recounting of the Reconstruction Era is one that strongly reflects his Marxist leanings and his “utopian, progressive mind.” He sees the role of the state in reconstruction as benign, its purpose being to create…
Wanjiru Njoya 8
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April 29, 2025

Calhoun: American Statesman

With the ideology of “wokeness” pervading much of our society, it is nearly impossible to have a meaningful conversation about Southern history, the War to Prevent Southern Independence, or the great statesmen of the South on any public forum without being tagged with one of the Left’s favorite sobriquets. Not long ago I saw an exchange on Twitter about John…
Ryan Walters 7
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April 28, 2025

Pickets

Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. 1 Corinthians 16:13 Fort Sumter, Appomattox, prelude days last line of Section vi of The Dwelling Place The stars around us gleam like bayonets As though another foe had gathered there To bear down on our army long dispersed Behind us in the cold and smokeless air.…
David Middleton 2
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April 25, 2025

Denying the Past

Originally published at SlaveNorth.com As the reality of slavery in the North faded, and a strident anti-Southern abolitionism arose there, the memory of Northern slaves, when it surfaced at all, tended to focus on how happy and well-treated they had been, in terms much reminiscent of the so-called "Lost Cause" literature that followed the fall of the Confederacy in 1865:…
Douglas Harper 6
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April 24, 2025

Whiskey Men

Originally published at In The Shadow of Red Rock As the New Year 1930 dawned across the hills, it seemed prohibition had made little difference to the tough and resilient mountaineers of my home. The cat and mouse game of whiskey men and revenuers seemed to be less-covered by the papers as of late, but it undoubtedly was still being…
Travis Holt 3
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April 23, 2025

The Federal Government Did Not Create the States

Originally published at Mises.org One of the statues that was taken down in the 2020 purge of the Southern statues was that of the great American statesman from South Carolina, John. C. Calhoun. The then mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, John Tecklenburg, said that “while we acknowledge Calhoun’s efforts as a statesman, we can’t ignore his positions on slavery and…
Wanjiru Njoya 3
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April 22, 2025

Calhoun’s Lesson for Europe

The Union, next to our liberty, most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States and by distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union – John C. Calhoun In A Disquisition on Government John C. Calhoun sought support for his political concepts among European solutions that had developed…
Karol Mazur 1
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April 21, 2025

American Refugees

A Review American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Migration from Blue States to Red States (Encounter Books, 2023) by Roger L. Simon Your eyes do not deceive you: the South is growing in population. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, since 2020 domestic migration trends have led to five of the top seven destination states being in the…
Thomas Ellen 11
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April 18, 2025

Jefferson v. Trump on Executive Power

In a comment to a recent essay on Jefferson, “Jefferson on Executive Action,” an Abbevillian wrote: Can’t put Biden anywhere near Jefferson. Trump. On the other hand, seems to be acting more, much more, in the interest of saving our Republic—whether he is aware of it or not. While no where near as eloquent as Jefferson—his presidential library may not…
M. Andrew Holowchak 8
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April 17, 2025

For God, King, and People

A Review of For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) by Alexander Haskell Intellectual history is the most difficult history to write. Too often it is written in a pedestrian manner resembling a genealogy from the Book of Genesis where this thinker begat that thinker and so on. Meanwhile, the followers…
John Devanny 2
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April 16, 2025

The South Remembers: Corsicana, Texas; Raymond, Mississppi

The Republicans used the heartbreaking murder of black Southerners by white Southerner Dylann Roof in Charleston, South Carolina to ally with the Democrats in their long-awaited attack on the memory of the Western people. Perhaps they thought that by throwing the South to the wolves, they’d save their own hides. So Nimarata Haley, then the governor of South Carolina, courageously…
Enoch Cade 14
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April 15, 2025

Gordon Chang, Allies Ad Nauseum

You can call it a trifecta or any of the obvious synonyms (trio, triplex, triad, etc.), but in any event, the contemporary political abstract  is aligned as  a unit melded from three:  one of the three being mostly admirable (within the bounds of mortal sinfulness), the second, mostly consist of  pitifully weak sissified men (and their cable-news whore), and the…
Paul H. Yarbrough 0
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April 14, 2025

Trump in Power: A Southern View

Originally published at Reckonin.com. Donald Trump is not the kind of character who appeals readily to Southerners. However, he is a recognisable un-Woke American type who deserves credit for some virtues. His is certainly not a Southern administration although a solid South made possible his big victory in the popular vote and the Electoral College. It is nice to see…
Clyde Wilson 15
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April 11, 2025

1861: A Storm Over Sumter

1861: Storm Over Sumter A  Charleston Play in One Act Cast Mary Chesnut                 Robert Barnwell Charlotte Wigfall            Abraham Lincoln (voice) Virginia Kirkland            Louis Wigfall James Petigru                  Robert Anderson James Chesnut                 Lawrence Scene 1 Seated at a large table, set for tea, on the piazza center stage, Mary Chesnut,38, dark hair bobbed to just below her ears, handsome rather than beautiful,…
Kirkpatrick Sale 1
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April 10, 2025

Jefferson on the Possibility of White Slaves and Black Masters

Sholars today typically refer to Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia as evidence of Jefferson’s racism. Jefferson states that Blacks were likely inferior in imagination, beauty, and intelligence, and more bestial and hasty in romance, but added that such sentiments must be taken cum grano salis—at least, until such time as they can be made objects…
M. Andrew Holowchak 3
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April 9, 2025

The Cultural Cleansing of VMI

Author's Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this piece are strictly my own. I do not presume in any fashion to speak for the Abbeville Institute or VMI. I severed all of my connections with VMI (except for the Class of 1967) when she removed "Stonewall" Jackson’s statue from the parade ground. Just before unleashing his thunderbolt on Hooker’s flank at…
H.V. Traywick, Jr. 13
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April 8, 2025

Impeaching Judges Should Never be off the Table

This piece was originally published at TheHill.com The judicial establishment is angry. President Trump has called for the impeachment and removal of Judge James Boasberg, who halted the administration’s deportation of Venezuelan gang members. J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and a “Never-Trumper,” warned that the president’s complaints about the judiciary threaten a constitutional crisis. Chief Justice John Roberts…
William J. Watkins 1
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April 7, 2025

Getting Right With Abe

This piece was originally published at Reckonin.com America will never come right until it gets right with Lincoln. He was not a saint who saved the Union and freed the slaves. He was a pathologically ambitious man who stumbled into the bloodiest war in American history, freed the slaves in the most destructive possible way, and cost the lives of…
Clyde Wilson 9
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April 4, 2025

The Importance of Constitutional Government

This piece was originally published at mises.org In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Jefferson Davis explained (vol. 2) the Southern cause, as he saw it: “When the cause was lost, what cause was it? Not that of the South only, but the cause of constitutional government, of the supremacy of law, of the natural rights…
Wanjiru Njoya 8
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April 3, 2025

Southern Story and Song

A review of  Southern Story and Song: Country Music in the 20th Century, (Shotwell Publishing, 2024) by Joseph R. Stromberg, Some claim that the zenith of Country Music’s popularity was in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. With mega-selling artists like Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, and Toby Keith, Nashville record company executives certainly weren’t hurting for cash during this era and…
John L. Goodwin 4
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April 2, 2025

This Was a Man

On July 11, 1875, "Old Billie", the former body servant of Confederate General Henry L. Benning, led Benning's horse over eight blocks to Linwood Cemetery, the "Old Rock's" final resting place in Columbus, Georgia. "Old Billie" proudly wore his Confederate grey coat as he followed Benning's hearse on the slow march to the family plot in Linwood. Benning died of…
Brion McClanahan 8
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April 1, 2025

A Southern Speech

From the October 17, 1866 edition of The New York Times. On Sept. 22, Gen. Wade Hampton delivered an address at Walhalla, Pickens District, S.C. The fol­lowing is the part of the speech which relates to na­tional affairs: You may perhaps, fellow-citizens, think that any discussion of general politics is inappropriate on an occasion of this sort, but as I…
Wade Hampton, III 7
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March 31, 2025

Thomas Jefferson, Black Women, and Male Orangutans

Jefferson’s reference in Query XIV of Notes on the State of Virginia to male orangutans’ preference for black women is often cited as evidence of his unabashed racism and Jefferson’s sheer lack of criticality and his credulity. Jefferson writes: Flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of…
M. Andrew Holowchak 2
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March 28, 2025

When the Yankees Come…

Paul Graham discusses his book on the slave narratives that described Yankee atrocities during the late stages of the War in 1865 during our March 2026 Zoom webinar. https://youtu.be/pgMfSHTzkks
Abbeville Institute 0
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March 27, 2025

Progressive States’ Rights

A review of Progressive States’ Rights: The Forgotten History of Federalism (University Press of Kansas 2024) by Sean Beienburg In The Future of the Past C. Vann Woodward wrote: “Serious history is the critique of myths…”. Practicing history requires honesty and research integrity. Until roughly the 1960s and 1970s, historians and political researchers were able to look at the issue…
Karol Mazur 3
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March 26, 2025

Make Arlington Great Again: An Open Letter to President Trump

The forthcoming is adapted from a letter which was written to President Donald Trump soon after his reelection. Copies of this letter were also forwarded to Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and many other officials in the administration. The recent renaming of “Fort Liberty” back to “Fort Bragg” augurs well for us. Dear Mr. President: Congratulations, sir,…
James Rutledge Roesch 5
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March 25, 2025

Sinners in the Hands of “Southern Studies”

Started out with the intention of a quick post on X about this book I’m reading, but my blood pressure kept rising and I kept writing and here we are. The book: Wilson, Charles Reagan. The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South. University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Mr. Wilson comes off as…
Chase Steely 5
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March 24, 2025

Green Men and Green Churches

A modern prophet from England, Paul Kingsnorth, has made the comment in a number of his essays that he appreciates how the ancient churches in England look as if they grew out of the soil itself rather than were constructed by human hands.  If one looks into Southern life, he will find that our churches share a strong resemblance to…
Walt Garlington 1
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March 21, 2025

Fibbing Finkleman on Thomas Jefferson

In 1994, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography published Paul Finkelman’s “Thomas Jefferson and Slavery: The Myth Goes On.” It is an essay, cleverly crafted, which deserves critical examination, because, cleverly crafted, it overwhelmingly misleads. Finkelman begins: Thomas Jefferson is certainly the most popular saint of American civil religion. His closest rival is Abraham Lincoln. But Lincoln was merely…
M. Andrew Holowchak 4
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March 20, 2025

Conservatism’s Womb

Almost four years ago I wrote an article regarding Tucker Carlson. The article was posted in “The Abbeville Institute” and described his attitude, as he had stated, regarding the South and its history with the Confederate States of America. My opinion was that Carlson (and I still have this opinion) is an intelligent conservative but misguided regarding the South’s Cause.…
Paul H. Yarbrough 4
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March 19, 2025

A Confederate Apology

A longer version of this essay was published at Rev. Beane's substack. I’ve made no secret about my views on a controversial period of American history: when thirteen states seceded from the American Union, formed a confederation, adopted a constitution, were invaded, were conquered, and were forced back into the Union - a Union transformed by the experience into a…
Rev. Larry Beane 17
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March 18, 2025

The Future Calhoun

Today is John C. Calhoun's 243 birthday. Several years ago, I took some time to visit John C. Calhoun's grave in Charleston, SC., a massive stone monument at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church erected in the 1880s to honor the State's greatest son. Calhoun's body had been exhumed three times, once from Washington D.C. after he died in 1850 so it…
Brion McClanahan 4
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March 17, 2025

Patrick Cleburne

From Cleburne and His Command (1908). From the foundation of the American Republic the Irish people have largely contributed to its upbuilding. Want of space forbids a recital of their services in the pulpit and in the forum, in commerce, agriculture, finance, and government. The military is the only one which can be treated in any degree of detail, for…
Irving A. Buck 5
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March 14, 2025

Red Pill Without Roots

This piece was originally published at The American Reformer. The Crisis of the Modern Right The greatest internal threat to genuine conservatism stems from modern ideological impulses that seek to reduce all human activity to simple precepts meant to explain the entirety of human existence. Today, this primarily takes the form of a neutralist liberalism masquerading as conservatism. In the…
Jonathan Harris 2
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March 13, 2025

Libertarian Confusion Concerning the Confederate Cause

Why would a defender of liberty defend the Confederate cause? This question is important in a time when many libertarians insist that the cause of the Confederacy was to defend slavery. If the Confederate cause was slavery, why would a libertarian defend it? A descendant of Confederate veterans may have an obvious reason to defend the Confederate cause as that…
Wanjiru Njoya 23
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March 12, 2025

What is Living and What is Dead in the Southern Tradition?

Dr. Don Livingston presents "What is Living and What is Dead in the Southern Tradition" at the 2025 Abbeville Institute Conference, "The New South and Future South", February 20-23, 2025. Purchase all of the lectures for this conference at: https://abbevilleacademy.org/p/thenewsouthandfuturesouth https://youtu.be/OkLKWU9f6tY
Donald Livingston 0
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March 11, 2025

How Did Jefferson Define “Democracy”?

Confidence in the people, writes C.E. Merriam, Jr., in a 1902 paper on Jefferson’s political thinking, was the “distinguishing characteristic in the theory of Jeffersonian democracy.” What Jefferson wrote on republican governing “was notable … because of its rhetoric than because of its scientific depth or clearness.” Jefferson offered nothing new, did not penetrate deeply into political theory, and was…
M. Andrew Holowchak 2
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March 10, 2025

The Big Lie

When the newly-minted Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, named Fort Liberty, North Carolina “Fort Bragg” after Roland L. Bragg, a native of Maine, who served in WWI, instead of the original namesake, many were quick to excuse it saying “he did the best he could” and, or “the law prevents any military installation to be named after a Confederate”. Poppycock. …
Lola Sanchez 13
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March 7, 2025

A Modern Bill of Attainder?

Arguably, few who have read the United States Constitution, noticed the three words that support the argument that the Naming Commission and implementation of its recommendations were unconstitutional:  “Bill of Attainder”.  And those who did, most likely paid little attention. But hidden in Article 1, Section 9 is a provision that was adopted without resistance by The Constitutional Convention in…
David McCallister 6
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March 6, 2025

Porches

The Village of Saline, Bienville Parish, North Louisiana At My Late Maternal Grandparents’ House The sand and gravel road, smooth asphalt now, Passes beside the church and sunken stones Of kin both dead and living yet awhile In memories of one who left and stayed. I slow down for those fields recalled and seen— The cultivated, fallow, undisturbed— Shift my…
David Middleton 2
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March 5, 2025

Nineteenth Century Jeffersonian Democrats

Originally published at Mises.org Following Donald Trump’s election victory, social media platforms were flooded with memes depicting the wailing and gnashing of teeth among Democrats bemoaning their loss. Some of these memes took a dig at the alleged historical predilection of Democrats for slavery. In a time when the subject of slavery is deemed to be so sensitive that the…
Wanjiru Njoya 8
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March 4, 2025

The South During Reconstruction

From the Author's Preface of E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1947). AMERICANS have generally called the fifteen years following the Civil War the Reconstruction period, and writers in this field until recently have let the reconstructing processes crowd out of their narratives everyday developments in the lives of the people. This custom has been especially true of…
E. Merton Coulter 0
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March 3, 2025

Last Train to Dixie

Last Train to Dixie by Jack Trotter.  Shotwell Publishing, 2021 It is a fact that usually, if not always, the most important books receive little attention or appreciation when they first appear. There are several reasons for this. American publishing is a commercial entertainment enterprise not intended for knowledge or thought. Publishers, “peer reviewers,” critics, and standard shallow “scholars,” are…
Clyde Wilson 4
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February 28, 2025

A Constitution for the Future South

Presented at the 2025 Abbeville Institute Conference "The New South and Future South" A green hill… covered with wavering grass… sweeps up to a mighty castle, bright in the summer morning. At the highest parapet of this castle, you stand. A light breeze ruffles your hair. You look out on…ring after concentric ring of ramparts encircling your castle, stretching to…
Terry Hulsey 9
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February 27, 2025

Witchcraft in Colonial Virginia?

A review of Witchcraft in the Colonial Virginia (The History Press 2019), by Carson O. Hudson Nowadays, witchcraft and sorcery are part of pop culture. Both in Europe and America. These issues permeate many histories in various countries of Western civilization. They are present in fairy tales, folk tales and legends. Their influence seems to be very significant. It is…
Karol Mazur 1
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February 26, 2025

Livin’ in the DMV

Colin Woodward, author of American Nations, identified eleven regional and rival cultures overlapping state boundaries that shapes American culture and politics. The work is insightful, bringing to mind the European observation that America is a continent, not a country. Woodward’s work has its limitations. One of these limitations is how to deal with the Megalopolis known as the District of…
John Devanny 7
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February 25, 2025

The Southern Cadence

We all have an idea that when we hear Southern Music, we know it, but what is it? What is it about Southern music that makes it stand out from other types of American music or music from around the world? How do you know it when you hear it? How do you explain to somebody the difference between the…
Tom Daniel 7
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February 24, 2025

Are We Worthy?

On February 22nd in 1732, George Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia. 130 years later, another American president gave his second inaugural address in Richmond, Virginia. "Fellow-citizens, after the struggle of ages had consecrated the right of the Englishman to constitutional representative government, our colonial ancestors were forced to vindicate that birthright by an appeal to arms. Success crowned…
Garrick Sapp 1
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February 21, 2025

Jefferson on Executive Action

Jefferson was ever committed to tripartite governmental powers, comprising an executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Each branch, he asserts to George Wythe (July 1776), should be independent of the others to offer itself as a check on the others. The independence of the executive from the legislative is of utmost importance, for otherwise the executive might have undue influence…
M. Andrew Holowchak 4
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February 20, 2025

Stonewall Jackson on the Sabbath and National Blessing

Originally published at TruthScript. Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson is one of the most well-known Confederate generals and beloved men of the South. He is also known for his devout Christian piety and service as a deacon in the Old School Presbyterian Church. Southern Presbyterian theologian and Confederate chaplain, R. L. Dabney, said that “Jackson’s religious character was strictly sincere and…
Sean McGowan 3
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February 19, 2025

We Are All Saint Oncho Now

Since the end of the War, with the Yankees in the ascendancy, the dominant ideas in the union have been mainly change, innovation, progress, and their near-of-kin.  Sultan Donald the Magnificent re-confirmed this in his Inaugural Address in January: ‘And, right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. There’s no nation like our nation. Americans are explorers, builders,…
Walt Garlington 5
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February 18, 2025

Happy Worst Presidents Day

Originally published at LewRockwell.com A 64-year-old woman with deep family roots in Alabama recently said to me that she was taught in Alabama public school that Abraham Lincoln was “the best president ever.”  That would be a good example of the consequences of what the New England Yankee conquerors labeled “reconstruction.”  The truth is that Lincoln was by far the…
Thomas DiLorenzo 5
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February 17, 2025

Lest We Forget

February 17th, 2025, marks the 160th anniversary of the burning of Columbia. Although there is already overwhelming proof that General William T. Sherman’s troops deliberately torched the capital city of South Carolina, once in a while, some “new” evidence turns up which can be added to the multitude of other testimonies on record. “Righteous Cause” adherents (beginning with Sherman himself)…
Karen Stokes 3
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February 14, 2025

Trump’s Order to Release JFK, RFK, and MLK Files Doesn’t Cover Everything

Three days after taking office as the 47th President, Donald J. Trump took the bold and necessary step of issuing an Executive Order that will result in the declassification (and one presumes the release) of all intelligence community files on the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations. Thus, President Trump made good on a 2024 campaign promise. It’s a vision of…
John Avery Emison 2
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February 13, 2025

The Priority of the Local

The online publication “Nature Communications” has an article titled, “Ideological Differences in the Expanse of the Moral Circle.” It demonstrates by use of a heat map, the moral priorities of the Right vs the Left. Using concentric circles, a heat signature upon those circles shows that psychologically the Conservative’s moral concerns are most intense at the center surrounding where he exists,…
Rod O'Barr 6
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February 12, 2025

Upholding the Sabbath

Perhaps shocking to some today, in the opening decades of the nineteenth century the transportation and delivering of the U.S. Mails on the Christian Sabbath (Lord’s day) was a hot political and social issue during several periods. The first was during the War of 1812, when Protestant denominations – mainly Presbyterian and Congregational – and professing Christians, generally, protested the…
Forrest L. Marion 3
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February 11, 2025

The Captive South

A Review of James Ronald Kennedy and Walter Donald Kennedy, Punished with Poverty: The Suffering South (Shotwell Publishing, 2016) A Real South For the redoubtable Kennedy brothers, James Ronald and Walter Donald, there simply is a coherent set of places called the South and people who are Southerners. Conventional wisdom aside, these folks have more in common with each other…
Joseph R. Stromberg 2
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February 10, 2025

Power Shift

A Review of Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (Random House, 1976) Editor’s note: Many Abbeville readers and supporters are familiar with Kirk Sale, a well-known advocate of decentralization and secessionism, and certainly a friend of the South. In asking him to review a book he penned in 1976,…
Kirkpatrick Sale 5
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February 7, 2025

A Matter of Perspective

For decades academic historians have attributed the causes of the Civil War to  two factors: First was to prevent Southern Secession in order to “Preserve the Union” because a United America was  a role model for the rest of Western Civilization.    Second was to prevent the spread of slavery into the federal territories because the institution was morally repugnant.…
Philip Leigh 8
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February 6, 2025

The Constitution Did Not Cause the War in 1861

Many especially Southern historians believe that the Federal Government established by the thirteen independent American States with the ratification of the Constitution of 1788 was directly responsible for the war of 1861, thus destroying the rights and sovereignty of all the existing States and making of them mere “legislative counties” charged with and limited to fulfilling the will of that…
Valerie Protopapas 4
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February 5, 2025

Did Jefferson Really Hate Washington?

Editor's Note: Professor Holowchak has published a SIGNED leather bound edition of his book, Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. You can take 10% the retail price at checkout by using the code JEFFERSON. Scholars commonly talk of the enmity between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as they commonly do of the enmity…
M. Andrew Holowchak 4
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February 4, 2025

The South in the American War for Independence

You probably learned in school that America began when the “Pilgrim Fathers” landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and really took off when the Puritans founded Boston. Never mind that these events happened some decades after the founding of Virginia. You probably also learned that the American Revolution story centers around Paul Revere and the battle of Bunker Hill, although New England…
Clyde Wilson 25
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February 3, 2025

“A Most Uncertain Response to the Declaration of Independence . . . .”

The interesting thing about the relationship of post-colonial American literature to the events of 1776 is the way in which a pious regard for the nation’s founders and for the enterprise which they set in motion has, among our writers, co-existed with a most uncertain response to the Declaration of Independence itself and to the loftiest aspirations which gather upon…
M.E. Bradford 2
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January 31, 2025

A Southern Success

My Southern grandmothers, like all Southern grandmothers, taught me that one should be quietly proud of accomplishments but never brag.  The eternal model, of course, being General Lee. I am going to violate their good advice (and not for the first time in matters of behaviour) by boasting about the near miraculous creation and success of Shotwell Publishing. Which I…
Clyde Wilson 11
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January 30, 2025

The Death of Debate

In ancient China, a physician could not look directly upon a lady from the Emperor’s court; she would appear before him in a screened palanquin. All diagnoses were the result of careful questions lest one offend, a matter that could lead to decapitation, or worse! — and an examination of the lady’s hands and wrists, the only parts of her…
Valerie Protopapas 7
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January 29, 2025

Go Away and Think

The first quarter of this century has been marred by cancel culture, a consequence of an ideology pursued by reformers who call themselves “progressives,” believing themselves morally superior to others.  By this ideology, each person in the world is categorized into oppressive or victim groups, largely based upon race, without regard to individuality.  It is a staggeringly ignorant way to…
Charles Roberts, MD 16
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January 28, 2025

Modern Challenges and the Southern Tradition

The Southern tradition has many answers to modern problems. The challenge is that few look there. They get close but stop short. On a recent episode of the All-In Podcast, David Friedberg made some salient points about the Constitution and federal spending. They were discussing the fact that federal spending is roughly 23% of GDP. He then went into some…
Garrick Sapp 1
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January 27, 2025

“I Will Make Known My Lineage to All of You”

Remember the speeches we bravely shared At the meadhall tables – we boasted from the benches That we would be heroes, hard-fighting in battle. Now we'll see who's worthy of his vow, Who'll back up his boast in the rush of battle. I will make known my lineage to all of you: I come from a mighty family of Mercians;…
Enoch Cade 8
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January 24, 2025

Jefferson’s “Religion”

In one of my recent videos, a viewer from Abbeville asked whether Thomas Jefferson was a deist or a theist. This essay answers that question. There has been and continues to be overwhelming confusion apropos of Jefferson’s religiosity. That is, in large part, due to Jefferson, whose behavior invites contradictory assessments of it. He attended worship and participated in prayers…
M. Andrew Holowchak 4
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January 23, 2025

Puritans, Quakers, and Michel Foucault

Although he is not “one of us,” Southern conservatives can certainly learn something from the eloquent blogger Steve Sailer.  For instance, Sailer recently summarized a new theory from a book which relates the Woke Cult to the North’s two characteristic religious strains:  “Puritans tended to be intense and Quakers nice,” Sailer observes.  “Put them together and you get an intolerant…
Jerry Salyer 1
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January 22, 2025

The Two Funerals of Jimmy Carter

This past week, I, along with the rest of the nation, watched the funeral service for President Jimmy Carter and followed along as his remains were transported around the country for his final goodbyes and honors.  I was born well after Carter’s Presidency, so I never grew up with any baggage regarding his Presidency nor Governorship.  I knew him at…
J. Shaw Gillis 1
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January 21, 2025

War on the Past

A University of Virginia religion professor said this about the presence of the Charlottesville Robert E. Lee statue: it was “like if there’s a rabid dog in the neighborhood that has been hurting people, and it needs to be euthanized.” Such a statement is ignorant, fanatical, and substitutes childish subjectivism for objective reality. The statue has since been destroyed. That…
Clyde Wilson 8
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January 20, 2025

Lee the American

It is now fourteen years since the publication of “Lee the American,” but the interest in at any rate the subject of the book seems by no means to have diminished. The colossal struggle of the European War, with all the passions and sacrifices involved in it, has made the American Civil War in general seem not perhaps less important,…
Gamaliel Bradford 10
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January 17, 2025

Is MAGA in the Southern Tradition?

In a previous article I compared the 2024 election to the Battle of Gettysburg and said that I was cautiously optimistic that developments after the election would result in a rearrangement of American institutions (governmental and otherwise) so that they would more closely resemble those of the constitutional republic envisioned by the Founders.  If this occurs it will be a…
Mike Goodloe 13
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January 16, 2025

Lincoln Idolatry is a Disease

It never fails to surprise me how supposedly educated people, with a purported knowledge in history and law, get the Emancipation Proclamation wrong. For example, this week on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show, Clay Travis credited Abraham Lincoln for freeing slaves in the Civil War in 1863.  Though he didn’t reference the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln…
Lola Sanchez 24
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January 15, 2025

The Land They Loved

A review of The Land They Loved, Vols. I and II (Shotwell Publishing, 2022, 2024). Clyde N. Wilson, known rightly as the dean of southern historians today—the most learned, the most honest—has a marked literary bent, which he has turned to the service of his homeland. Under the collective title The Land They Loved, he has assembled two volumes of…
Catharine Savage Brosman 2
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January 14, 2025

Bill Neal: A Culinary Genius of the South

It was in New Haven that I picked up a seminal Southern cookery book written by a young Southern chef working in Chapel Hill. His name was Bill Neal. On the dust jacket cover of the first edition that I bought, I see Bill Neal as a young happy man in his thirties. He is standing inside one of Chapel…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh 3
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January 13, 2025

The Bard of the South Carolina Low Country

Archibald Rutledge, a major South Carolina and national writer in the first half of the 20th century, seems to have dropped nearly out of sight.  His books are mostly available, when obtainable at all, in over-priced used remnants. Yet Rutledge was in his time  a celebrated and bestselling author of hunting and nature accounts, memoirs, and  a  poet of lasting…
Clyde Wilson 0
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January 10, 2025

Gettysburg

Under a copse of oaks, a mile or so from the ridge, we sit well hidden from the enemy. Yet at the moment, we’re less concerned about the Yanks than finding relief from the stifling heat. Hot, humid, and not a hint of a cloud in the sky. The woolen uniforms are no help either. Will stands up, and leans…
Fred Miller 4
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January 9, 2025

The South’s Forgotten Fire Eater

A review of The South's Forgotten Fire Eater: David Hubbard & North Alabama's Long Road to Disunion (New South Books, 2020) by Chris McIlwain Establishment historians typically portray Southern history as a cartoonish parade of superficial, racist, self-interested characters dedicated to the preservation of slavery. Every action by Southern political actors requires a discussion about how it relates to the…
Brion McClanahan 12
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January 8, 2025

Thomas Jefferson, Hugh Blair, and the Fine Art of Writing

As a writer of some accomplishment—over 70 published books and several hundred essays—my success in writing is due to my deep love of writing. Most of the scholars that I know have told me either that they find writing painful or at least unpleasant. That is not the case with me. There are times, and they are not infrequent despite…
M. Andrew Holowchak 2
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January 7, 2025

Frances Fisher Tiernan: North Carolina’s Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell is for many Americans, especially Georgians, a household name.  Her Civil War epic holds a prominent place in the modern American literary and film halls of fame, and quotes from her novel still come out of the mouths of many Americans.  In contrast, one would be hard-pressed to find a bookshelf in any home or public library that…
J. Shaw Gillis 2
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January 6, 2025

A Slap in Jimmy Carter’s Face?

The Episcopal Church USA has long prided itself as hosting the venue for state occasions at its so-called National Cathedral in Washington D.C. The National Cathedral is a large building in the gothic style which was built over the course of decades with much fund-raising done by that denomination nation-wide. Begun in 1907, the Cathedral is actually dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, but…
David McCallister 15
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January 3, 2025

I Ain’t Apologizing

Jon Harris has been affiliated with the Abbeville Institute for nearly a decade. He was one of our Summer School students, has been responsible for some of our video work, and was the editor and producer of our 1607 Project documentary. He hosts the popular YouTube channel Conversations That Matter and published two books on social justice and Christianity. He…
Abbeville Institute 2
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January 2, 2025

The Danger Still Not Over

In October 1801, Virginia’s great revolutionary and jurist Edmund Pendleton addressed a public excited about the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency.  At eighty years old, this senior statesman offered thoughts on the election and the future of the United States.  Pendleton’s bona fides were well known: member of the Continental Congress, first speaker of Virginia’s House of Delegates,…
William J. Watkins 4
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January 1, 2025

Crossing the River With My RC

When I was a young boy, circa six or seven, there were no monstrous interstate highways slashing across the land. The land was beautiful, or as I probably thought, at the time, natural. Interstate highways are about as natural as was Sherman’s march through Georgia. They are federal (Yankee) spending, creating great slashes through private property (eminent domain is Grendel;…
Paul H. Yarbrough 8
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December 31, 2024

The New South and Future South

What does the Southern tradition have to offer America in 2025? Richard Weaver wrote in his Southern Tradition at Bay that the Old South may not be a place where we would want to live, but it certainly could offer examples of how to live. That’s a pregnant statement. Southerners, more than Americans in other sections, held fast to tradition…
Brion McClanahan 1
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December 30, 2024

The Sword Was Their Passport

While working on an essay about LSU Press, I came across a title I wanted to buy for my library. I searched for months—nothing. I finally made a two-hour roundtrip to a university library that lends books to locals. That’s where I found Harris Gaylord Warren’s The Sword Was Their Passport. Published in 1943 by Louisiana State University Press, Warren’s…
Chase Steely 0
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December 27, 2024

Another Example of Anti-Southern Judicial Activism

Earlier this month, a Federal District Court Judge in the Middle District of Georgia, Clay D. Land, ruled against the National Ranger Memorial Foundation in their lawsuit against Biden Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and others, regarding the brick paver honoring John Singleton Mosby at the Ranger Memorial at Fort Moore, formally known as Fort Benning, Georgia, that was targeted…
David McCallister 6
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December 26, 2024

Thomas Jefferson’s Christmas Eve Wish

On Christmas Eve 1786, a mawkish Thomas Jefferson pens a letter (below, in toto) to Maria Cosway, a lovely Italian painter and musician, married by convenience to the eccentric and monkeylike Richard Cosway—a foppish macaroni. Jefferson met the Cosways on August 6, 1786, when he and American artist John Trumbull met them by accident while Jefferson and Trumbull were admiring…
M. Andrew Holowchak 0
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December 25, 2024

A Christmas Day in Charlotte

"A merry Christmas and a happy New Year!" These be immortal words. They suggest happy firesides and blazing logs; the joy of little children; the repeated handshake; the ready offering of charity; the deepening of love; and a sweeter showing of spiritual life. As the words are written, the voice of the cow bell and the tin horn and the…
Charles Henry Smith 0
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December 24, 2024

Moravian Star

In an effort to be unique, a new ubiquity has consumed Christmas decorations across the nation – inflatable snowmen glow in every front yard, multicolored neon lights clash dramatically at property lines, and Santa’s feet stick upright out of chimneys.  In stark defiance to this trend, the city of Winston-Salem, with its demure Christmas decorations, features prominently in Southern Living…
J. Shaw Gillis 2
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