Originally published at Reckonin.com
Here are some good books published in fairly recent years that you may not have encountered.
Perrin Lovett, The Substitute and Aurelius and Other Tom Ironsides Adventures. I am tempted to call Tom Ironsides a Southern James Bond, but he is a much better man and more relevant to our times than Bond. Once a CIA operative, Ironsides left the agency when he began to realise the evil and incompetence of the American imperial regime.
Now he chooses his own missions, confronting when he can small evils in our world, evils that may perhaps have a supernatural backing. Tom, based in the Carolinas, is also a scholar with a doctorate in classics and a keen constructive interest in education outside the failed public school system. We can hope his adventures will continue.
Howard Ray White, Rebirthing Lincoln: A Biography. There is the pious story of Abe Lincoln being born in a log cabin in Kentucky. But there have always been questions about Lincoln’s origins, for which there is no solid documentary evidence. Howard White has done exhaustive investigation of the subject, bringing forth much neglected evidence. In fact, Lincoln was four years older than he claimed and was born in Rutherford County NC, the illegitimate child of Abraham Enloe and servant girl Nancy Hanks. Nancy married Thomas Lincoln and moved with him and her one-year old Abraham to Kentucky. White’s examination and presentation of evidence is broad, meticulous, and convincing. One of many persuasive proofs is the uncanny resemblance of the grown Lincoln to Abraham Enloe. Howard White of Charlotte, not a professional historian, has been for some years one of the best and most prolific Southern writers, woefully unrecognised. Take a look at some of his many books.
Jeb Smith (pen name Isaac Bishop), I’ll Take My Stand: Defending the Southern Cause for Secession should be published within weeks of your reading this. Nearly every decade since The War there has been an excellent defense of the South published. This is one of the best ever. The writer is a New Englander who came to the South’s defense just by honest research and reading of history.
You may remember Fred Reed of Virginia, who for several decades published strong and often humourus maverick columns in various conservative and libertarian websites against the bad American regime and its masters. Shotwell Publishing has inaugurated a series of collected Fred Reed writing called Many Roads. Vol. 1 is Down Dixie Way, Southern memories and defense. Vol 2 is Vietnam, China, and Other Military Disasters—Past, Present and Future. Reed’s observations are just as relevant now as they were when written some years ago. There will be further volumes.
Non-Southern historians have always now and then published close studies of various aspects of the Union war against the Confederacy. Here are a few.
*William Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation among Union Soldiers During the Civil War.
*Andrea Nolen, Lincoln’s Counterfeiters: The Wisconsin Gang That Funded the Union and Started the Chicago Mob.
* Kevin Orlin Johnson, The Lincolns in the White House: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln’s Slave Trading.
*Paul Taylor, ‘Tis Not Our War: Avoiding Military Service in the Civil War North.
In the same vein by a Southerner, Philip Leigh, another badly under-rated historian: *Trading With the Enemy: The Covert Economy During the Americal Civil War. Look into these works and you will never be tempted to believe that the Yankee invasion and conquest of the South was a righteous thing.
Time Will Tell: Collected Poems of David Middleton. The publication of David Middleton’s collected verse from 1973 to 2025 is a hallmark event in Southern culture and literature. If the U.S. was a genuinely civilised nation, not controlled by third-class “intellectuals” interested only in themselves and Wokeness, it would be recognised as a major event in American literature. With the recent loss of George Garrett, Fred Chappell, and other greats, Middleton and Catharine Savage Brosman are now the greatest living Southern poets, which is to say the greatest living American poets.
Middleton is the Bard of Louisiana but his verse covers vast territory of time and place. You will find here a complete picture of family, rural life, and history for his State. Also an eloquent and telling portrayal of the failings of “progressive” modern society, written from a viewpoint Christian and guardedly wise about our human condition. If you like poetry, and even if you don’t but want to know the South, read some of Middleton’s verse. He paints the real history of the Southern people in memorable art.
My favourite of his many great poems is “The Old Guard’s Coronach,” a meditation on Southern resistance. Friends, remember, I would like this to be read if there is ever some final memorial to me.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
