A [r]epublican in Exile
In Washington, D.C., while serving as Secretary of War in the 1850s, Jefferson Davis met Ambrose Dudley Mann, a native of Virginia who was the Assistant Secretary of State (and the first man to hold… »
A Forgotten Spiritual Hero
Daniel Baker (1791-1857) is all but forgotten today, but in the first half of the nineteenth century this Presbyterian minister was a well-known and profoundly influential evangelist in America. Born in Midway, Georgia, he was… »
The South’s Gifts to Posterity
What does the South have to offer that is valuable to humanity, to civilization? In 1939, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman proposed an answer to this question in his book The South to… »
We the People of South Carolina….
William Plumer Jacobs (1842-1917), a native of Yorkville, South Carolina, was a Presbyterian minister and scholar whose entire life has been called “a singular consecration to work and service in behalf of his fellow men.”… »
The Spirit of ’61
The bloody conflict of 1861 to 1865 is often called the Civil War, but most Southerners regarded it as a war for independence and self-government. Many if not most Confederate soldiers and officers who fought… »
A Bloodless Victory
Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, is known as the place where the “Civil War” began. The South is normally portrayed as the aggressor, the side which fired the “first shot,” and is thus given… »
Northern Lies about the Burning of Columbia
When you hear or read about the burning of Columbia, General Sherman’s principal target in South Carolina, you are often told that the origin of the fire is a historical mystery that can’t be conclusively… »
The Timely Wisdom of Robert Lewis Dabney
Many of the destructive ideas and “isms” of our century in America had their roots in the 18th and 19th centuries, and a number of Southern writers and clergymen recognized their nature and warned against… »
Union or Else
In 1864, General William T. Sherman wrote to a fellow Union officer that the “false political doctrine that any and every people have a right to self-government” was the cause of the war that had… »
The Conversation Club of Charleston
This essay was presented at the 2016 Abbeville Institute Summer School. When I was young I used to read a lot of books about archaeology—the study of ancient lost worlds and civilizations. I never got… »
