Maryland Redeemed
Everybody knows that our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was written by Francis Scott Key as he watched the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812. Almost nobody knows the rest of the story. In 1861, Key’s grandson, Francis Key Howard, was locked up in Fort McHenry. Howard wrote: “The flag which he then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over the victims of as vulgar and brutal despotism as modern times have witnessed.” The despotism referred to was that of Abraham Lincoln and the victims were Marylanders imprisoned for opposition to the despot. Abbeville Scholar Joyce Bennett knows well Maryland’s long history and the charming and unique Southern culture that was once its pride. In Letters from the Outpost: Essays on the Cultural Cleansing of a Small Southern State
Sesquicentennial Devoir
The sesquicentennial of the War to Prevent Southern Independence is almost past. Compared to the centennial observance of the 1960s, it has left little trace. But America was a very different place then, with very different people and a different dominant agenda. Michael Givens, a gifted and internationally recognized cinema-photographer, served as Commander-and-Chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans during the Sesquicentennial. He commissioned a series of articles for the SCV magazine that provide an arsenal of scholarly truth about The War. These are now collected in a book, To Live and Die in Dixie: The Struggle Continues . . . by Seventeen Southerners, edited by Frank B. Powell III. The writers of the twenty-seven articles include Abbeville Scholars Donald Livingston, David Aiken, Clyde Wilson, Marshall DeRosa, Karen Stokes, Boyd Cathey, and Egon Tausch, as well as a number of others familiar to Southern readers such as Ronald and Donald Kennedy and Walter Brian Cisco. The book is published in both hardback and paperback and is available from the SCV at 1-800-380-1896, with a discount for SCV members.
