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Should We Despise Lincoln?

From what has been shown throughout this book, it would seem obvious that we should. No single man in American history has done more to abolish liberty than him. Yet Lincoln was not the real issue; he was one person, powerless unless backed by voters and wealthy interests. If we imagine the political decay instituted by the war and his…
Jeb Smith
March 5, 2026
Blog

Kin & Covenant: America’s Clan Culture

The American South has always been a collection of tight-knit communities rooted in family. The earliest settlers were often relatives or from neighboring European villages.  From the very beginning, this was the case almost unilaterally in America. Families immigrated together and moved in unified collectives across desired locales across the colonies. The first families of Virginia were mostly descended from…
Cole Branham
March 4, 2026
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How They Canceled the Dunning School

Readers will be aware that the Dunning School was cancelled by the Marxist historian Eric Foner, but it is worth revisiting the details of exactly how Foner achieved this momentous feat. The reference to “Dunning” usually refers to the distinguished historian William A. Dunning, but it is also used more broadly as a label for his PhD students and the…
Wanjiru Njoya
March 3, 2026
Blog

The South and the American Empire

A Review of Joseph R. Stromberg, The South and the American Empire: Essays (Shotwell Publishing, 2026) Those familiar with the work of Joseph Stromberg know the mastery Stromberg has over the secondary literature in a diversity of academic fields. In the preface, Clyde Wilson states, “Joseph Stromberg is the consummate scholar for all seasons.  . . . is many essays…
John Devanny
March 2, 2026
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Thank You For Your Service

This proposal by an outgoing homosexual Democratic Party Virginia legislator to remove three statues - one of which is of a former governor (two times over!) of the Commonwealth - from the State Capitol grounds, is hardly surprising. Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of historical cleansing, but Democrats are certainly worse in terms of Orwellian historical revisionism - and…
Rev. Larry Beane
February 27, 2026
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49 Winchester

49 Winchester are a Southern band in the oldest, least marketable sense of the term. They are a group that formed because some guys in the same place played music together before they’d ever heard of tours and contracts. They come from Castlewood, Virginia, in the far southwestern corner of the state, an Appalachian region closer in spirit and history…
Tom Daniel
February 26, 2026
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The Merchant Prince of the Rio Grande Who Chose the Confederate Cause

When 200 Union cavalrymen rode toward Laredo on March 18, 1864, their mission seemed straightforward. Destroy 5,000 bales of Confederate cotton stacked at San Agustín Plaza, worth millions of dollars at wartime prices, and cripple the South's economic lifeline to Mexico. What stood between them and their objective was a garrison of just 42 men commanded by a Mexican American…
Jose Nino
February 25, 2026
Blog

Quantrill: The Truth at Last

If you have seen the 1976 Clint Eastwood film “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” you may remember that it opens when the hero, a peaceful Missouri farmer, has his home destroyed and his wife killed by Kansas Jayhawkers.  He then joins the Southern guerilla fighters. This was the reality for thousands of Southerners living in western Missouri. An even better film,…
Clyde Wilson
February 24, 2026
Blog

The Wrong Conclusions

This article addresses the actions of eleven Southern States in the middle of the 19th Century vis a vis the actions presently taking place in and by a number of States and urban areas including the motives and legality of such actions by both groups involved. This small study is being done in order to address what has become a…
Valerie Protopapas
February 23, 2026
Blog

A New Edition of a Southern Classic

According to everyone’s favorite font of leftist wisdom, Wikipedia, “it is not clear which side caused the fires” which consumed Columbia, South Carolina, on February 17, 1865. You get a similar answer from AI on Google. However, anyone who cares to read the voluminous eyewitness testimony (from both Southern and Northern sources) will be left in no doubt about who…
Karen Stokes
February 20, 2026
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Liars and/or Fools (and Fires)

Democrats have essentially degenerated into liars and/or fools. There is no third choice. If third graders spoke the way Demos do and of the things they advocate, they would be sent back to kindergarten, en masse. Republicans haven’t degenerated to anything-- they are the same nationalists (neo-socialist- seedlings, as are all nationalists) they have always been. However, Republicans now claim…
Paul H. Yarbrough
February 19, 2026
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Songs of Lament

There is a particular kind of song that only appears after history has already banged its gavel and rendered its verdict. While some songs are intended to rally the faithful or stiffen resolve, this is not that kind of song. This song arrives later, once the cannons have cooled, the banners have been folded away, and the surviving population has…
Tom Daniel
February 18, 2026
Blog

Minnesota Confederates?

Originally published at Reckonin.com Public officials in Minnesota - governor, attorney general, and mayor - are resisting enforcement of legitimate immigration law and encouraging their citizens to physically interfere with federal law enforcement. They have absurdly and perversely used States’ Rights arguments to justify their actions. There has even been ridiculous mention of the 10th Amendment which has been a…
Clyde Wilson
February 17, 2026
Blog

The “National Republicans”

Were the American Whigs the natural extension of the Federalists? This is a complicated question and one that creates a simplistic understanding of the American past. It also removes both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison from any complicity in the intellectual origins of the Whig Party. The Federalists as a "national" political faction died in 1815, tarnished by their war…
Brion McClanahan
February 16, 2026
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Jefferson’s True Love

On January 1, 1772, Jefferson took as his wife the widow of Bathurst Skelton, Martha Wayles Skelton, at The Forest—the residence of John Wayles, father of Jefferson’s wife. Once married, the two set out for the long ride to Monticello. They drove their carriage in a light snow which became denser as they entered the Virginian countryside of Albemarle County.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 15, 2026
Blog

It Really Is Blue

Originally published at Reckonin.com If you spend any time at all online, you're aware of the proliferation of artificial intelligence-created content. Tools exist which have made AI now easily accessible, free or cheap to use. This powerful tool is in the hands of the general public with virtually no oversight in place, and as you might imagine, the content being…
Anne Wilson Smith
February 13, 2026
Blog

From Cuban Freedom Fighter to Confederate Colonel

When Spanish bullets tore through Ambrosio José Gonzales's thigh in a Cuban plaza in 1850, he became immortalized as the first Cuban to shed blood fighting for independence from Spain. 14 years later, he would command Confederate guns against Union troops at the Battle of Honey Hill, inflicting one of the most lopsided defeats of the Civil War. Born in…
Jose Nino
February 12, 2026
Blog

Lincoln’s Mercenaries

A review of William Marvel, Lincoln’s Merenaries: Economic Motivation Among Union Soldiers During the Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2018) As the eminent historian John Lukacs observed, causation and motivation are the two most difficult historical phenomena to prove and explain. In part, this is due to the complexities of human nature; men and women are rarely, if ever,…
John Devanny
February 11, 2026
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Bookmen South of Richmond

In October of 1949, Bernard Mannes Baruch walked into the Virginia State Library in Richmond with letters. One hundred fifty-two of them, written in a hand any student of the War would recognize, the neat, right-sloping script of Robert E. Lee. They were addressed to Jefferson Davis between 1862 and 1865, dispatched from field tents and hurried through the lines.…
Chase Steely
February 10, 2026
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Harry Byrd, Carter Glass, and Opposition to the New Deal

In the words of one scholar, “the years from Reconstruction to the late 1950s witnessed Virginia’s fall from prominence.” This statement is true in many respects, as the South suffered greatly after the war and Reconstruction, not only in an economic sense but a political one as well. No Southerner could hope to win the presidency or vice presidency in…
Ryan Walters
February 9, 2026
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Recovering the True Intent of E Pluribus Unum

"E Pluribus Unum," Latin for "Out of many, one," appears on the Great Seal of the United States and coins. Its roots lie in Virgil's poem Moretum, but in America, it symbolized political unity among the thirteen states during the Revolutionary era, not diversity as the left and PragerU claim. The phrase entered American use in the Great Seal's design…
Garrick Sapp
February 6, 2026
Blog

“Our Confederacy”

The socialist-democrat party’s leaders—particularly Rep. Pelosi—have taken to referring to “our democracy.” The term serves as a cudgel against political opponents in the de-civilizers’ attempts to justify or garner support for whatever unethical, unlawful, or unhelpful activities they seek to advance. How many of them—or even ordinary American citizens—realize that in the antebellum period it was not uncommon to encounter…
Forrest L. Marion
February 5, 2026
Blog

The Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson

A review of Luigi Marco Bassani’s Liberty, State, & Union: The Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson (Mercer, 2010). I am always appreciative when I can read the title of some book and it gives me some idea of the content of the book and its thesis. That might seem like a claim, mundane and perhaps even foolish. Are not all titles…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 4, 2026
Blog

Front Porches

When people talk about the history of American music, they almost always picture a stage, with a spotlight and a performer separated from an audience by footlights and distance. We imagine these grand, almost sacred spaces designed for reverence and applause. Of course, those places definitely matter, but they come late in the story. Southern music did not begin on…
Tom Daniel
February 3, 2026
Blog

Two Secessionists

Most Americans continue to believe that Southerners invented secession (and nullification) as a defensive tactic to preserve slavery, and by "most Americans" I include so-called "conservatives" like Francis Sempa at The American Spectator and Hayden Daniel at The Federalist. According to this narrative, secession and nullification were little more than treasonous and petulant responses to justifiable federal laws. Both Sempa…
Brion McClanahan
February 2, 2026
Blog

The Mystery of the Beale Treasure

In 1885, there was published in Lynchburg by James B. Ward a small manuscript, titled The Beale Papers, Containing Authentic Statements Regarding the Treasure Buried in 1819 and 1821 near Bufords, in Bedford County, Virginia, and Which Has Never Been Recovered. The pamphlet, which sold for 50 cents, contained three ciphertexts. A ciphertext is a matter of encrypting or encoding…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 30, 2026
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How a Spanish Officer Became the South’s Most Celebrated Filibuster

Narciso López de Urriola entered the world on November 2, 1797, in Caracas, Venezuela, born to a family of prosperous Basque merchants who enjoyed considerable colonial privilege. His relatives navigated the turbulent Venezuelan Wars of Independence by pledging allegiance to the Spanish crown. History would deliver a bitter irony when this young man, who would eventually epitomize Caribbean liberation movements,…
Jose Nino
January 29, 2026
Blog

Dolly Parton and Southern Endurance

Greatness. In Southern music, “greatness” is rarely the result of innovation alone. More often, it emerges from endurance—specifically, the capacity to move through cultural, commercial, and institutional pressure without surrendering. The South has produced countless musicians whose work crossed boundaries of region, genre, race, and class, but far fewer who managed to do so while retaining control over their voice,…
Tom Daniel
January 28, 2026
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Why Forrest Encouraged an End to Racial Conflict

There is no better place to begin understanding the party politics of the post-reconstruction South than with the Fourth of July celebrations organized by the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers in Memphis, Tennessee, 1875. The Pole-Bearers were a “fraternal society,” or mutual aid society, for the welfare and defense of black people. In attendance at this event were various former Confederate…
Wanjiru Njoya
January 27, 2026
Blog

Southern Conservatism vs. Ideology

American conservatism and Southern conservatism are different. This statement may seem a little confusing since the South is part of America and, besides a brief period in the 1860s, has never existed separately from the United States. However, the society which developed south of Mason and Dixon’s line has a history and tradition stretching far back into the colonial days…
A.A. Wayne
January 23, 2026
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Conflicting Visions of America

Originally published at the Alabama Gazette. “The contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions may be wrong but they are…
John M. Taylor
January 22, 2026
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The New South, 1877-1919

Originally published at Reckonin.com Historians have found as a useful periodisation “the New South,” beginning with the withdrawal of the last federal occupation troops and the end of Reconstruction and ending with World War I and the election as President Woodrow Wilson, Southern-born and bred, although not very Southern in most of his thinking. Speaking broadly of this period we…
Clyde Wilson
January 21, 2026
Blog

I Don’t Want Christmas to End

I Don’t Want Christmas to End, the 2021 Christmas album by Zach Williams, doesn’t feel as much seasonal as it feels Southern. Recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Zach Williams’ first full-length holiday record does a lot more than borrow the iconography of classic American music as it absorbs the essence of the iconic studio that shaped American…
Tom Daniel
January 20, 2026
Blog

Remembering Robert E. Lee

When Yale history professor David Blight wrote Race and Reunion in 2001, he argued that his attempt to discuss how Americans “remembered” the Civil War offered a new interpretation of the conflict. He termed it “memory studies.” Blight thought that Southerners—and for a time Northerners as well—remembered it wrong, and they did so consciously: Reconciliation joined arms with white supremacy…
Brion McClanahan
January 19, 2026
Blog

Regional Roots in a Global Age

In the twenty-first century, global interconnectedness has become the dominant paradigm of social, economic, and political life. Cosmopolitan ideals, such as global citizenship, transnational governance, and the celebration of universal human rights, have been championed as markers of progress and modernity. Yet, this enthusiasm for a borderless world often comes at the expense of local and regional identities, which are…
Clifford A. Bates, Jr.
January 16, 2026
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The Long Battle Against the South Enters 2026

There have rarely been long-lasting Eras of Good Feelings in the United States.  Clashes between the various cultures existing within the union have more often than not been the norm – clashes over tariffs, wars, abortion, slavery, monetary policy, over the very nature of the union itself. Those clashes are not by any means absent as a new year is…
Walt Garlington
January 15, 2026
Blog

A Venezuelan on Southern Soil

In the tangled web of modern geopolitics, where Venezuela and the United States circle each other with increasing hostility, a forgotten chapter whispers of a time when a Venezuelan patriot walked the American South soil not as an adversary but as an admirer, a student, and ultimately a brother in revolution. His name was Francisco de Miranda, and his story…
Jose Nino
January 14, 2026
Blog

Calhoun’s Doctrine of the Concurrent Majority

Originally published at Mises.org In the absence of effective checks on government power, all governments tend towards tyranny. This explains why John C. Calhoun defended the constitutional principle of limited government, emphasizing the importance of restraining the power of the majority. Calhoun argued that the aim of a constitution is not merely to confer power, but also to restrain it,…
Wanjiru Njoya
January 13, 2026
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Economic Problems of the Southeast

Originally published at Folkchain.org The remains of the Dutch-owned American ENKA plant cover the land in Lowland, Tennessee, like a steel skeleton picked clean. The smokestacks rise red against the sky, two of them, maybe a hundred fifty feet high. The parking lot has cracked enough to let a little wilderness in, an archipelago of grass and weeds pushing up…
Chase Steely
January 12, 2026
Blog

Uncomfortable Truths for the Righteous Cause Myth

The following are uncomfortable truths for "Righteous Cause Mythologists:" 1. Africans created, organized, and supplied the international slave trade without any European involvement or direction, and Northers profited heavily from the institution. 2. Southerners established most of the early abolition societies in the United States. 3. "Jim Crow" segregation developed in Connecticut and was pervasive in New England in the…
Brion McClanahan
January 9, 2026
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What Ambrose Bierce Said About “Confederaphobia”

Ambrose G. Bierce was born in Ohio in 1842. When the War Between the States came in 1861, he enlisted as a Union soldier in the 9th Indiana Infantry. He fought in numerous battles, including Philippi, Rich Mountain, and Shiloh. He suffered a severe brain injury at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain which caused him to resign from the army,…
Timothy A. Duskin
January 8, 2026
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The Mysterious Relationship Between Thomas Jefferson and Black Mathematician Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), the son of freed slaves, was a natural scientist and mathematician. Born in Baltimore County, Maryland, little is known of the exact course of his life. He appears to have been mostly self-educated. His early years of manhood were spent mostly on his 100-acre tobacco farm, owned by his parents, freed slaves. He was, however, a tinkerer…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 7, 2026
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An Open Letter to the University of the South

The University of the South appears poised to remove many, if not all, Confederate names and images from its campus and memory because they may smack of Southern treason/secession and slavery. Such removal is a poorly conceived idea. First, secession (i.e., "independence") is probably the one, true and great gift that America has offered Mankind. Second, slavery is an American,…
W.E. Shofner
January 6, 2026
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The Foreign Policy Wisdom America Ignored from John C. Calhoun

Few American statesmen traveled a more remarkable foreign policy journey than South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun (1782-1850). The young War Hawk who promised to conquer Canada in four weeks became the elder statesman warning that conquest would destroy the republic itself. Such a foreign policy transformation would seem foreign to present-day public officials, who are completely enthralled by the…
Jose Nino
January 5, 2026
Blog

What Does it Mean to be “Southern”?

What does it mean to be “Southern”? This question has vexed Americans since the founding. Every American knew that sectional differences existed. George Mason, for example, worried that the “Eastern States” would plunder the agricultural States further south. He drafted an amendment that would have prevented “navigation laws,” i.e. protective tariffs, for that reason. Gouverneur Morris openly suggested that if…
Brion McClanahan
December 30, 2025
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An Ode to the Magnificent Memory of CSA General Robert E. Lee

A noble son of Old Virginia, of which she ought to be always purely proud and say she knew, Was the ever honorable cavalier by the notable name of Robert E. Lee who decided to, Resist Northern tyranny, by fighting/or states' rights, native land. and to ably assure and see, That the Southern people might remain free, if only the…
Joseph A. Settanni
December 29, 2025
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Eggnog Nationalism

Originally published at Folk Chain of Memory. Winter often brought reprieve in the wars of the past, but not in the Eggnog War. Unlike the fashionable moral ambiguities peddled by our gender-ambiguous storytellers, this war permits no compromise. Here we find no fashionable shades of gray. We’re not flipping houses. The Eggnog Question divides as clearly as foundations, rock against…
Chase Steely
December 24, 2025
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Liberty and the Plow: Defending Our Rights Against Federal Overreach

Originally published at Medium.com By Agricola, a Freeholder of the Republic “Liberty is preserved not by distant power, but by limits placed upon it.” As a third generation agrarian in the Western United States, I inherit not only the soil worked by my family but also the principles they instilled in me — chief among them, the sanctity of private…
Darcy Lammers
December 23, 2025
Blog

A Vaudeville of Devils

This piece was originally published at A Memoir of the Occupation. (Wars in the age of mass democracy are waged over ideas, a wise man once said (maybe Collingwood, though I can’t find the quote). So, yes: I’m happy to grant that slavery was a cause of the War Between the States. Or, rather, the portrait of slavery conjured by…
Enoch Cade
December 22, 2025
Blog

The Matrix, MAGA, and the Southern Tradition

As with many technological developments in American history, such as the internet itself, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being introduced with little occasion for the populace to be informed as to its potential impact or any opportunity for them to weigh in with their concerns.  Such is life in the Republic of Technology, aka The Machine.  Rather, the entire debate is…
Mike Goodloe
December 19, 2025
Blog

The Forgotten Voyagers

In the shadowed corners of American history lies a story rarely told, a narrative of colonists who crossed an ocean twice to forge communities in the swamps and plains of the Deep South. These were the Isleños, a people whose very name whispers of distant shores and forgotten tongues. The Spanish word for "Islander" would come to identify an entire…
Jose Nino
December 18, 2025
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Not Gone–Just Blowing with the Wind

In the movie Gone with the Wind, just after the credits were presented there was a forward line as follows: “There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the old south. Here in this pretty land gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last to be seen of knights and their ladies fair; of master and of…
Paul H. Yarbrough
December 17, 2025
Blog

Same Old, Same Old

A review of Against the Machine: on the Unmaking of Humanity (Thesis, 2025) by Paul Kingsnorth In an interview included in the press handout for Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth is asked why he wrote this book now.  Good question. “The rise and triumph of the Machine,” he says, “is becoming increasingly obvious in the 2020s, so the moment seems…
Kirkpatrick Sale
December 16, 2025
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Modern Yankees Use the Historical Propaganda Model Created by the Soviet Communists

It is verboten in most places across the United States to say anything favorable about Southerner leaders who either personally embodied or fought to defend – with pen, sword, or by political means – authentic Southern tradition.  The institutions of the Left (media, academy, Hollywood) and the Right (talk radio, governments of Red States and counties/parishes, Fox News) seem to…
Walt Garlington
December 15, 2025
Blog

Crossing the Rubicon

Originally published at the Alabama Gazette. Crossing the Rubicon, a common phrase used to describe a point of no return, is typically traced back to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the river Rubicon in January 49 BC, initiating the Roman Civil War. An analogy can be drawn between the actions of Caesar and those of Lincoln in his call for 75,000…
John M. Taylor
December 12, 2025
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A Few Southern Reflections

Originally published at Reckonin.com. Before the War for Southern Independence the main theme of American government was republican virtue and honour. The defeat of the Confederacy established a new main theme - making money. That was the most important result of the War. Compare Lee and Grant. Or the real characters of Jeff Davis and the corporate lawyer and tricky…
Clyde Wilson
December 11, 2025
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The Confederates Who Chose Brazil

They sailed into Brazil more through memory than fact now, not as tourists or traders but as refugees from a vanquished republic. Between 1865 and 1875, an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 former Confederates left the wreckage of the American South and started over in the Empire of Brazil. Their exodus counted among the largest political departures of United States citizens…
Jose Nino
December 10, 2025
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History Is Not a Science

Originally published at Mises.org. The court historians, who insist that they have the only “correct” view of history, like to claim that theirs is the only true version of history because it is based on primary sources. But they fail to distinguish between what the primary sources state, and their own interpretation of the significance to be attached to those…
Wanjiru Njoya
December 9, 2025
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The Conspiracy No One is Talking About

Originally published at From the Desk of Jon Harris. I recently recorded a podcast on John Taylor of Caroline’s important but often neglected book New Views of the Constitution (1823). I initially believed that the most compelling way to introduce this work to modern audiences would be to highlight how Taylor, writing from a federalist perspective, disagreed with Joseph Story’s…
Jonathan Harris
December 8, 2025
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Jefferson and the Indians

Jefferson’s views on Indians were characterized by ambivalence. Jefferson both loved and hated Native Americans at times because he de profundis animi (from the depths of his soul) loved Native Americans. That is not posited as a thesis, for it should be obvious to anyone who examines Jefferson’s presidential writings on Native Americans, but as an observation. Jefferson was, through…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 5, 2025
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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
December 4, 2025
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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
December 3, 2025
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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
December 2, 2025
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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
December 1, 2025
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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
November 26, 2025
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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
November 25, 2025
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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
November 24, 2025
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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
November 21, 2025
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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
November 20, 2025
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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
November 19, 2025
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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.
November 18, 2025
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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
Abbeville Institute
November 17, 2025
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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
November 13, 2025
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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
November 12, 2025
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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
November 11, 2025
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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
November 10, 2025
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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
November 7, 2025
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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
November 6, 2025
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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.
November 5, 2025
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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
November 4, 2025
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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
November 3, 2025
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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
October 31, 2025
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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
October 30, 2025
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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
October 29, 2025
Blog

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
October 28, 2025
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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
October 27, 2025
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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
October 24, 2025
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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
October 23, 2025
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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
October 22, 2025
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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
October 21, 2025
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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
October 20, 2025
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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
October 17, 2025
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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
October 16, 2025
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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
October 15, 2025
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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
October 14, 2025
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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
October 13, 2025
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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
October 10, 2025
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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
October 9, 2025
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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
October 8, 2025
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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
October 7, 2025
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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
October 6, 2025
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“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
October 3, 2025
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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    
Abbeville Institute
October 2, 2025
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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
October 1, 2025
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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
September 30, 2025
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“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
September 29, 2025
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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
September 25, 2025
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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
September 24, 2025
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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
September 23, 2025
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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
September 22, 2025
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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
September 19, 2025
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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
September 18, 2025
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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
September 17, 2025
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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
September 16, 2025
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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
September 15, 2025
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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
September 12, 2025
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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
September 11, 2025
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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
September 10, 2025
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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
September 9, 2025
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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
September 8, 2025
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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
September 5, 2025
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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
September 4, 2025
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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
September 3, 2025
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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
September 2, 2025
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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
August 29, 2025
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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
August 28, 2025
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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
August 27, 2025
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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
August 26, 2025
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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
August 25, 2025
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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
August 22, 2025
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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
August 21, 2025
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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
August 20, 2025
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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
August 19, 2025
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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
August 18, 2025
Blog

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
August 15, 2025
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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
August 14, 2025
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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
August 13, 2025
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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
August 12, 2025
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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
August 11, 2025
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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
August 8, 2025
Blog

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
August 7, 2025
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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
August 6, 2025
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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
August 5, 2025
Blog

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
August 4, 2025
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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
August 1, 2025
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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
July 31, 2025
Blog

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.
Abbeville Institute
July 30, 2025
Blog

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
July 29, 2025
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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
July 28, 2025
Blog

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
July 24, 2025
Blog

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
July 23, 2025
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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
July 22, 2025
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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
July 21, 2025
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“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
July 18, 2025
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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
July 17, 2025
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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
July 16, 2025
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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
July 15, 2025
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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
July 14, 2025
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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
July 10, 2025
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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…
Abbeville Institute
July 9, 2025
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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
July 8, 2025
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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
July 7, 2025
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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
July 4, 2025
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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
July 3, 2025
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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
July 2, 2025
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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
July 1, 2025
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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
June 30, 2025
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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
June 27, 2025
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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
June 26, 2025
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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
June 25, 2025
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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
June 24, 2025
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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
June 23, 2025
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“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
June 20, 2025
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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
June 19, 2025
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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
June 18, 2025
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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
June 17, 2025
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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
June 16, 2025
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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
June 13, 2025
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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
June 12, 2025
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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
June 11, 2025
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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
June 10, 2025
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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
June 9, 2025
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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
June 6, 2025
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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
June 5, 2025
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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
June 4, 2025
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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
June 3, 2025
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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
June 2, 2025
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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
May 30, 2025
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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
May 29, 2025
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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
May 28, 2025
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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
May 27, 2025
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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
May 26, 2025
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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.
May 23, 2025
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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
May 22, 2025
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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
May 21, 2025
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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
May 20, 2025
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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
May 19, 2025
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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
May 16, 2025
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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
May 15, 2025
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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
May 14, 2025
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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
May 13, 2025
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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
May 9, 2025
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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
May 8, 2025
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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
May 7, 2025
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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
May 6, 2025
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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
May 5, 2025
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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
May 1, 2025
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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
April 30, 2025
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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
April 29, 2025
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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
April 28, 2025
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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
April 25, 2025
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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
April 24, 2025
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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
April 23, 2025
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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
April 22, 2025
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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
April 21, 2025
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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
April 18, 2025
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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
April 17, 2025
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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
April 16, 2025
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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
April 15, 2025
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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
April 14, 2025
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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
April 11, 2025
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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
April 10, 2025
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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.
April 9, 2025
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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
April 8, 2025
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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
April 7, 2025
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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
April 4, 2025
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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
April 3, 2025
Blog

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
April 2, 2025
Blog

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
April 1, 2025
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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
March 31, 2025
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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
March 28, 2025
Blog

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
March 27, 2025
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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
March 26, 2025
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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
March 25, 2025
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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
March 24, 2025
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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
March 21, 2025
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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
March 20, 2025
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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
March 19, 2025