‘Their revolution (the South in 1861) … was in fact an act of restoration, for the constitution drawn up in Montgomery in 1861 for the Confederate States of America was a virtual duplicate of the United States Constitution.” John McCardell in his Introduction to Jesse T. Carpenter’s “The South as a Conscious Minority, 1789 – 1861”, re-published by the University…
The chattering class’ newest obsession, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has seized the policy initiative from the Democratic Party’s geriatrics by promoting a “Green New Deal.” T’is clever branding to combine left-wing eco virtue signaling with FDR’s version of “down home” fascism. (If one doubts me on this last point, I refer you to John Garraty’s seminal article, “The New Deal, National Socialism,…
It was an indelible moment, one that has resonated with me up to the present day. My father and I had gone to whatever permutation of Wal-Mart existed at that time in Union County in late 1982. (Maybe it was still Edwards then, maybe Big K; the chronology is no longer clear so many years later.) He was a supervisor…
Presented at the Lee-Jackson Banquet, Finley’s Brigade Camp 1614 – Tallahassee, Florida, 19 January 2019 Prologue It seemed like just another day at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, for the vice chancellor of student affairs, Paula Knudson, until the phone calls, student visitors, and official “hate and bias” reports began to pour in. A truck—a semi-tractor trailer truck to…
A Review of The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent (Knopf Publishing Company, 1990) by Robert Caro “I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: ‘As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal; Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel; Lo, Greed is marching on.’”…
In the ongoing war against Southern Confederate heritage, we need to be cognizant of the academic pressures against it. As y’all know, UNC Chapel Hill recently tore down Silent Sam. This is going on throughout all the great Southern schools. As a professional scholar, I was a member of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature; the Southern Historical…
The dominant powers in American discourse today have succeeded in confining the South to a dark little corner of history labeled “Slavery and Treason.” This is already governing the public sphere of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Such an approach not only libels the South, it is a fatal distortion of American history in general, and, I dare say, even of…
On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which free-soil hecklers forced him to address his ideas on slavery. “He was not in favor of it,” the Concord Independent Democrat reported. “He had never seen a slave without being sick at heart. Slavery was contrary to the Constitution in some…
One summer day in Paris, France, just a year after the Great War, a former French military officer, not yet nineteen years of age was invited by his father to have a chat. Slim, handsome, and gifted, the young man knew it was time for the big talk concerning his future now that peace had returned. To help him make…
When one grows old one tends to resent wasting time and there is nothing that wastes time quite so much as efforts to counter the claims and assertions surrounding the American “Civil War” Of course, the first of these is that the conflict was not a “civil war.” But those who insist upon that label continue to do so despite…
The destruction of Confederate monuments and the slandering of all things Confederate is in vogue in contemporary mainline media, academia, and the political establishment. The destruction of Confederate monuments by radical mobs is similar to the radical Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist monuments and the Soviet Union’s denial of public expressions of native culture in the Baltic states—all are examples of…
None knew it then, but in 1915, Southern agrarian influence on the movies was at its height. The film trade had just left Fort Lee, New Jersey, only to land in the equally piously named Mount Lee, California. Of course, the latter’s new name was Hollywood, due to its Kansas prohibitionist developers, but it was also the same name as…
The Abbeville Institute conducted three conferences this year on the fracturing of American national identity and what means for the Southern tradition and the Southern people. The general public knows America is coming apart and that they’re anxious about it, but most don’t understand why because our political leaders and the national media generally suppress its origins. We wanted to…
Why do Southerners continue to fall into that trap where we only talk about the years1861-1865? There are almost 400 years of Southern culture to talk about, yet we keep limiting ourselves to just four of them. And it doesn’t matter how much of an expert someone becomes about Fredericksburg, Yankees will always have that same ace-in-the-hole comeback, “You lost.” But…
Two of the poems I most admire are very short. One is simply a name – Shoeless Joe Jackson. Read it aloud and feel the assonance and alliteration. The other is a phrase Say it ain’t so, Joe, delivered sadly, with its final rhyme. There is a mythic quality in both of these poems. The name, Shoeless Joe Jackson; the…
A review of Slavery, Secession, & Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe, 1856-1865 (Scarecrow Press, 2007) by Charles Adams. At long last Charles Adams’s new book, Slavery, Secession, & Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe, 1856-1865, has been published. I’ve been anxiously waiting for this book for about five years. The book contains about…
As the brilliant American military victory in the Persian Gulf approaches its second anniversary, the focus has shifted from the emotions of homecoming celebrations to the seriousness of lessons learned and lessons validated. While the ingredients of victory are a combination of many factors, from logistics to training to armament, history has shown that one of the most important elements…
Citizens of Dixie…. This is a call to arms, or rather, a call to your legs and feet. Get up off that couch! If you don’t have family plans, ballgame, school play, or church event- get out and tour Dixie! Take a few hours, a day, or a weekend, and see the beauty and history of Dixie. Start local; tour…
The opinion has been often stated that Edgar Allan Poe was bizarre and amoral; that he was a lover of morbid beauty only; that he was unrelated to worldly circumstances-aloof from the affairs of the world; that his epitaph might well be: “Out of space-out of time.” But it is dangerous to attempt to separate any historical figure from his…
A review of Andrew Durnford, A Black Sugar Planter in the Antebellum South by David O. Whitten, (Transaction Publishers, 1995). I In the year 1800 the Viceroyalty of New Spain was still intact, and Louisiana still part of the Spanish Empire. So, too, was Mexico, Texas, all the Southwest of today’s America, north to Kansas and clear to the West Coast…
From the front porch, Jakob Emig could look across fields where his winter wheat greened nicely. An old man now, with sons gone off to war, he lived mainly in a woman’s world of married daughters and daughters-in-law on farms scattered nearby. He himself lived alone, widowed now for two years, hard work during war-time finally having taken its toll…
We are threatened by a powerful, dangerous, conspiracy of evil men. The conspiracy is the enemy of free institutions and civil liberties, of democracy and free speech; it is the enemy of religion. It is cruel and oppressive to its subjects. Its economic system is unfree and inefficient, condemning its people to poverty and deprivation. It has a relentless determination…
Prehistoric warfare was total war in which victors normally killed all enemy women, children, and adult males, according to groundbreaking research published by Lawrence H. Keeley, in his book War Before Civilization1. Keeley wrote that primitive war was always a struggle between societies and their economies, and warriors carried out that struggle. Rome fielded great armies, in historical time, and…
A review of “An Arch Rebel Like Myself;” Dan Showalter and the Civil War in California and Texas, by by Gene Armistead and Robert D. Arconti (North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2018). Discussion of the War for Southern Independence often includes facts about who were the last to lay down their arms. It is commonly argued that Gen. Stand Waite’s…
There was a time, before universal white male suffrage and the closing of the frontier, when the poor whites of the South were considered shiftless and without caste. If we were to look at the South as a hierarchical system, it could be argued that the poor whites were a kind of pariah. There’s a common misconception that all whites…
“Nashville’s going to be a progressive, diverse city and there’s nothing that you can do about it. Millennials moving from up north and foreigners immigrating from across the border have changed the city’s population and thus changed the city’s way of life – for the better. Nashville isn’t a Southern city anymore and is never going to be a Southern…
A review of The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 by Saul Cornell (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). The Anti-Federalists who opposed ratification of the Constitution have not fared well among American historians and political , scientists. Nothing reveals more starkly the near-complete disinterest in Anti-Federalist thought than a bibliographical check of books and essays on…
Constitutional Violation: Amendment One: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. “Freedom of speech and freedom of the press, precious relics of…
A Review of Union At All Costs: From Confederation to Consolidation by John M. Taylor (Booklocker, 2016). Most of the time, finding historical gems requires a lot of work and often long hours of arduous research. On rare occasions, they just fall into your lap. It is even more unusual for someone to simply drop one onto your plate. However,…
Jimmy Carter may have been the last Jeffersonian to be president. A recent article in the Washington Post labeled him the “Un-Celebrity President.” In either case, Carter is a reflection of a people and a place. He is the most authentic man elected president since Calvin Coolidge, and like Coolidge a true Christian gentleman. At the very minimum, Carter represented the…
Because we live in such a hurried time, we hear countless “noises” but have little time to appreciate actual “sounds.” Sound is a sensation that you can feel, not just something you can hear. To understand this idea, consider how some musicians have actually played concerts for the deaf, who cannot hear the music but still feel the vibrations. These…
The 1970’s were an interesting time in the South. The 1970’s were the last time Southerners could be Southern without feeling the need to apologize for, or be ironic about, their Southern identity. In fact, in the 1970’s, it seemed to actually go a little beyond this. We shouldn’t push this too far, but in 1970’s America there seemed to…
In the book The Mystery of the Wonder-Worker of Ostrog, the main character, Mladjen, a fictional representation of the modern Serb uprooted from his traditions by the lingering effects of Communism (who is very much akin to many of those inhabiting the New South, shorn of so much of their past by the all-too-present effects of Communism’s alter-ego, Capitalism), has…
Sometime around 1939, Lead Belly sang the song Daddy I’m Coming Back to You, which features the interesting lyrics: “I’m dreaming tonight of an old Southern town, the best friend I ever had…I’ve had my way, but now I’ll stay, I long for you and for home.” The song was a tribute to Jimmie Rodgers, who is often considered one…
This essay is Chapter 13 in Mr. Taylor’s Union At All Costs: From Confederation to Consolidation (2016). “I supported President Lincoln. I believed his war policy would be the only way to save the country, but I see my mistake. I visited Washington a few weeks ago, and I saw the corruption of the present administration—and so long as Abraham…
The leading authority on this aspect of affirmative action is Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (by a plurality) that it is permissible for a state to ban affirmative action. The case arose out of a voter-approved initiative amending the constitution of Michigan that made affirmative action illegal in public education,…
Last November, when President Bush issued an executive order establishing a system of military commissions to punish non-citizens, I asked myself, as no doubt countless other Americans did, “But what about Ex Parte Milligan (1866)?” Surely George W. and his Dad had studied this landmark Supreme Court decision in the course of those searching discussions of American history they must…
James Iredell was born at Lewes, Sussex County, England. He was the eldest of the five sons of Francis Iredell, a Bristol merchant, and Margaret McCulloh Iredell, originally of Dublin. Young James came to the New World in 1768 because, after his father suffered a stroke in the mid-1760’s, it was necessary for the boy to leave school and accept…
There are many examples of heroism that illustrate spiritedness in America’s history. Indeed, the American Revolution was won because of the indomitable spirit of the Patriots and a growing unwillingness of the British to put down the campaign for independence. The same spirit was present a century later during the War between the States. It is routinely acknowledged that Confederate…
They were standing at the ledge. Their view mirrored a panorama of buildings and smoke stacks. Great edifices, heaving asymmetrically, skewed with monster cylinders venting plumes of expended energy. The farms, the land, scarcely discernible, were hiding from the crowding machines in ambient spaces where life of life and lives of lives grappled and struggled for survival. The agrarians had…
“Lincoln, under no circumstances, would I vote for … So, I say, stand by the ‘Constitution and the Union’, and so long as the laws are enacted and administered according to the Constitution we are safe …“ (emphasis added) Letter from Sam Houston to Colonel A. Daly, August 14, 1860 The 1860 Election was still 3 months in the future and…
In the film version of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, after Atlanta has been burned and Scarlett O’Hara is fleeing to Tara, there is a scene where she arrives at neighboring Twelve Oaks Plantation to find it burned by Yankee troops and in ruins. The mansion’s once-grand double staircase is open to the night sky, and a cow appears…
A review of America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, by David Goldfield (Bloomsbury Press, 2011). Whether or not the American Civil War might have been avoided has long been a subject of debate among historians. Some, like Allan Nevins and Charles and Mary Beard, saw the war as “an irrepressible conflict,” in the words of Abraham Lincoln’s…
The bloody conflict of 1861 to 1865 is often called the Civil War, but most Southerners regarded it as a war for independence and self-government. Many if not most Confederate soldiers and officers who fought in it had fathers or grandfathers who served in the first American war of independence, and they were mindful of their heritage. Southerners were proud…
A review of The Confederate Cherokees: John Drew’s Regiment of Mounted Rifles by W. Craig Gaines (LSU Press, 2017). When most people think of Confederate Cherokees, the name Stand Watie immediately comes to mind. This book is not about Stand Watie’s troops but about John Drew’s Regiment of Mounted Rifles. It is also not so much about Confederate Cherokees as…
The Electoral College, a bulwark of federalism, is under attack. Straightforward abolition of the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, which is most unlikely to be passed in the foreseeable future. But the Electoral College now faces a more serious, insidious threat from the so-called National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC,) which purports to operate through the Electoral College…
Picture it. A book store in Madison, Wisconsin, in the mid-’90s. Quite the unlikely place you’d expect to be exposed to the true history of the Pilgrims being totalitarian religionists, not the freedom-seeking refugees in funny hats, bonnets, and buckled-shoes we hear about in grade school. This took place at a book signing and lecture, not given by a historian,…
“When you are up to your hindquarters in alligators—it is hard to remember that your intentions were to drain the swamp.” This old country-boy saying seems most appropriate for President Trump as he attempts to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. The continuing efforts of the ruling elite in Washington to destroy a lawfully elected president because “their” anointed candidate…
Mel Bradford has argued that no individual has exerted more influence upon the development of a profession of letters this century in the South than Donald Davidson. The poet, essayist, and social critic is well known to most literary scholars and historians of the South; however, Davidson’s critique of the Southern experience remains largely unappreciated. Several years ago the author…
It was the purchase of Louisiana, therefore, which gave impetus to a plan which had been creeping upon New England, aided and stimulated by the Essex Junto. They agreed that the inevitable consequences of the annexation of this vast territory would be to diminish the relative weight and influence of the Northern section; that it would aggravate the evils of…
Oh! Save the souls of the Lords of Gray. Donned their swords and scabbards. Rode into cause valiant to pray. Ever still they cease from marching forth; Holding their cause against a vile North. Men in gray suits though equal in stripe, Bare their hearts and sinew. Defend the world against the snipe, They bleed into soul far from Lord’s…
As the 2018 legislative session was winding down in Annapolis, the Senate passed a bill retiring the Old Line State’s Confederate call to arms, but that bill was to die in committee in the House of Delegates. So, once again, though “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” has been archived, “My Old Kentucky Home,” “updated,” “Maryland! My Maryland!”—some would say…
On an abnormally warm early Spring day, I took a 150 mile motorcycle ride from Portsmouth to Stony Creek, Virginia. It is where my Great Great Grandpa, Randolph Page, was captured by Federal Forces in 1864. He rode with the SC 6th Insurgent Cavalry (Aka: the Dixie Raiders). His unit fought in nearly every major engagement in Virginia from 1862,…
A review of Southern Horizons: The Autobiography of Thomas Dixon (IWV Publishing, 1994). The name of Thomas Dixon today is little remembered, North or South, but seventy years ago Dixon was one of the most prominent and controversial public figures in the country. The discovery and publication of his autobiography ought to be considered a significant event in the cultural…
A review of Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution by M.E. Bradford (Georgia, 1993). Since the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, numberless books re-examining the document and the convention that made it have issued forth from commercial publishing houses and university presses. While some of them are excellent and make important contributions in the…
It is near impossible to express any admiration of the antebellum South without incurring the wrath of the perpetually offended mob, online or otherwise. Even acknowledgment in the accomplishments of those men once universally and unequivocally admired by all Americans, such as Washington, Jefferson, and Lee, now brings the occasional sneer or mark of condemnation from “polite” society. Unfortunately, for…
A review-essay on A Memory of Manaus: Poems by Catharine Savage Brosman. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2017. A Memory of Manaus, Catharine Brosman’s eleventh full-length collection of poetry, confirms her rightful place in the front rank of contemporary American poets. Working skillfully in both traditional forms and in tightly controlled free verse, Brosman is among that very small number…
The Stockholm Syndrome is a condition where captives or hostages develop a psychological attachment and loyalty to their captors. Psychologists often describe this syndrome as a “survival strategy.” This strategy is employed by captives when all hope for returning to a normal life appears to be lost. By befriending one’s all-powerful captors, life is preserved within the new “normal” order. …
When Georgia Scenes came from an Augusta, Georgia press in 1835, the literary world realized (to varying degrees) that here was a new kind of book. It took a discerning critic like Edgar Allan Poe to recognize so immediately that its “verisimilitude” was an outstanding trait. What was so radically new about the work was its author’s intention not to…
Modern American society seems to have little understanding of what really happened before, during and after the War Between the States. To see evidence of this one need look no further than the shocking success in eradicating and censoring Southern monuments and artwork, the names of various buildings and roads, or even symbols of Southern history itself. And while some…
More than 150 years after the Civil War, the nation is engulfed in controversy over statues of people who fought for the Confederacy. Many people want the statues taken down. The statues, they say, depict men who were slaveowners, slavery proponents, and traitors. Those who want the statues to stay in place are said to be racists. The feelings run…
For most of our nation’s two and a half century history, newspapers were the essential source of public opinion. Although newspapers expressed political preferences, regional newspapers did provide other sides of stories, as well as a variety of editorial opinions. But as the 1950s drew to a close, the public began getting its news from a few television networks. Reporters…
At the Battle of Nashville, on 16 December 1864, the Tennessean’s brigade, fought valiantly, but Brigadier General Thomas Benton Smith soon found himself surrounded on three sides by Federal troops. A bullet had pierced the skull of Colonel William M. Shy, the commander of Smith’s original regiment, the 20th Tennessee Infantry. He had fallen, fighting to the last, and holding…
A July 2017 article from Buzzfeed.com, the hallmark of all popular wisdom of our time, was entitled, “15 Things You’ll Understand If You’ve Ever Eaten At A White Friend’s House.”[i] In the article, a series of snarky memes and illustrative pictures were meant to communicate the idea that “white people” don’t know anything about “spicing up” their food. In other…
A review of Pickett’s Charge – The Last Attack at Gettysburg by Earl J. Hess (UNC Press, 2001). When I was still on active duty with the U.S. Army, the true “Gettysburg” book was Professor Coddington’s The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (1968). But his book was about the entire battle and command and not the attack. Hess mentions several others,…
At the time of his death, was Robert E. Lee a man without a country? No, the Gray Fox of the Confederacy was not like the naval officer in Edward Everett Hale’s novel who cursed his country. Lee’s country, before and after the War Between the States, was the United States of America, a republic he served with valor and…
In our politically correct culture where even the mildest criticism of a societal group can earn someone the label of racist, it remains open season on rural America. When Barack Obama famously spoke of rural Pennyslvanians in 2008 as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” and are prone to “anti-immigrant…
As the old cliché goes, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” The phrase has been around forever, it seems, and sometimes it can be true, I suppose. There are always exceptions to every rule. But most of the time, a terrorist is simply a terrorist, a person who uses extreme violence and fear to achieve a political or…
Russian-American relations over the past two and a half centuries, like the weather in Alaska, the land Russia sold to the United States in 1867 for ten dollars a square mile, have blown from very warm to extremely frigid; but its balmiest period by far was during the War Between the States. In stark contrast to America’s sixteen-year hiatus in…
A review of Karen Stokes, A Legion of Devils: Sherman in South Carolina (Shotwell Press, 2017). Many of us have read about the horrendous things William Tecumseh Sherman did as he and his “bummers” marched through Georgia, things a lot of us would rather not have read about. However, if we are to properly understand our history we are often compelled…
A review of Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy by Earl J. Hess, University of North Carolina Press, 2016. In Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy, prolific Civil War historian Earl J. Hess attempts the near impossible task of resurrecting the reputation of one of the Civil War’s most disparaged generals. Many contemporaries and…
From the beginnings to rather recent times, sympathetic portrayals of Confederates have been a mainstay of America cinema. An astounding number of major stars without any Southern background have had no objection to favourably portraying Confederates (and other Southerners). It might be noted that two of the major figures of early American film, D.W. Griffith and Will Rogers, were the…
Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free: Beginning of Jefferson’s Statue for Religious Freedom, passed by the Virginia Legislature in 1786 I With one intro line Jefferson explains the core of human liberty. Our minds, a composite of intellect and heart that defines us as human, are forever free to choose what to believe, where to inquire, who to…
With roots in urban America, the libertarian New Class, which staffs so many of today’s influential think tanks, is disinclined to view the troubles in rural America as a real crisis. This group tends to view a farm as simply another unit of production that, if inefficient, should wither away without public concern—indeed no more deserving of concern than the…
A review of Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet, The Life of Luther Martin, by Bill Kauffman, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008 “Happiness is preferable to the Splendour of a national Government” Luther Martin to the Constitutional Convention, June 28, 1787, Kauffman at 41 This book takes no prisoners. Nor does it gloss the favored actors. It sides with Martin’s stance at the…
The mark of an advanced civilization is the rule of law, with the highest being the rule of law that protects life, liberty and property. Based upon this standard, the Confederate States of America embodied an advanced Christian civilization. Accepting this truism goes a long way in understanding why the Confederacy has been demonized to the point of eradicating it…
Lincoln’s War established a permanent, centralized regime of crony capitalism for the formerly federal U.S. In the centralized U.S., real power is in the hands of big business and big banks that use government to protect and increase their own private profit and wealth. Lincoln implemented Henry Clay’s “American Plan”, without giving it a name. At the time, however, free…
An Address given on the Occasion of the Observance of Confederate Flag Day Raleigh, North Carolina | 03 March 2017 SEVEN SCORE AND SIXTEEN YEARS AGO, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new union, freely chosen and legally adopted by eleven Southern States with the consent of the people, and expressed through their chosen delegates in solemn assembly;…
Presented at the 2017 Abbeville Institute Summer School. When historians discuss reasons for Southern secession, as if the South needed to produce one, perhaps the most important, and sometimes neglected, motive was the protection of the Jeffersonian tradition, essentially the right to self-government. What was this Jeffersonian tradition or ideal? It is our lost political heritage of limited government and…
A number of years ago I became interested in the writings of the great Southern author and philosopher Robert Lewis Dabney (d. 1898). Dabney, if he is much known at all these days, is famous because he was chaplain to Confederate general, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and because he penned a Life of General Thomas J. Jackson (1866) and then for…
Presented at the 2017 Abbeville Institute Summer School. You are deplorable. It is worse than that. If you are Southern or interested in the South you are the most deplorable of all the deplorables. There is no place for you among the enlightened and virtuous people of 21st Century America. But perhaps there is a certain advantage to being an…
On July 5th, the Abbeville Institute published an article entitled “Southern Identity and the Southern Tradition” by John Devanny. Mr. Devanny noted that Marxism is involved in attacks on southern culture and heritage and wrote that many of them were “the inheritors of a secular Puritan legacy and the disciples of cultural Marxism who began to dominate the academy in…
A Review of Catharine Savage Brosman, Southwestern Women Writers and the Vision of Goodness, McFarland Press, 2016. The term “man of letters” has fallen largely into desuetude over the last few decades, and for good reason. Very few such entities exist nowadays on the literary landscape either in this country or elsewhere. One is more apt to come across a…
“The modern man has lost his sense of vocation.” “A Statement of Principles,” I’ll Take My Stand “One wonders what the authors of our Constitution would have thought of that category, ‘permanently unemployable.’” –Wendell Berry A Review of Land!: The Case For an Agrarian Economy by John Crowe Ransom, Edited by Jason Peters, Introduction by Jay T. Collier University of…
“…You said he’s a Confederate general. They’re the bad guys. And he’s probably racist… We’re going to raise our kids here. I don’t want some Confederate General ghost teaching them his racism…”[I] Yep… a “bad guy”… a “racist”… a boogeyman… That’s what Hollywood, mainstream media and a large part of American society and politics think of your Confederate ancestor. This…
A Review of: Look Homeward by David Herbert Donald, Little, Brown, 1987. When David Herbert Donald recalls his youthful reaction to Look Homeward, Angel, he describes a magic that many of us felt upon encountering Thomas Wolfe as adolescents: “I was convinced-without any just cause-that I too was misunderstood by my family and unappreciated in my community, and, like Eugene,…
Anyone who has been paying attention has heard many times the assertion that the flag of the Southern Confederacy is equivalent to the banner of the Nazi German Reich. That this idea should gain any credit at all is a sign of how debased American public discourse has become by ignorance, deceit, and hatred. To make an obvious point: The…
Part One: Definitions and Origins Money is a great mystery. In my years of teaching economics courses and economic history nothing so confuses students, and their elders, as the subject of money. Or rather I should say the subject of money and currency. Some of this confusion is a result of the failure of economists to agree on standard definitions…
This essay was written in 1982 under the direction of Emory Thomas at the University of Georgia and was originally titled, “The Affluent Section: The South on the Eve of the War Between the States.” “Once upon a time we all knew that the antebellum South was poor”, asserted Harold D. Woodman in the 1975 issue of Agricultural History. He was…
This piece was originally published at Townhall.com. Mayor Mike Signer—who had declared his intention to make Charlottesville, Virginia, the “capital of the resistance” to President Trump and a sanctuary city “to protect immigrants and refugees”—is refusing to protect a symbol saluting one of America’s greatest men. Yes, Robert E. Lee was a great American. If Signer knew the first thing…
Most modern historians give the post Civil War Republican Party a free pass on racism. They generally presume that the Party’s demand for black suffrage and civil rights in the South was motivated by the intrinsic morality of racial equality and pejoratively contrast it with the violent resistance such policies sometimes encountered from the region’s whites. Earlier historians, however, more often…
The Left is wringing its hands and talking about impeachment because of the Comey firing, but it has a very short memory–its hands resemble Lady MacBeth’s- dripping with the blood of Republicans they have savaged in unceremonious firings over the years. Some of the very people crying buckets of tears for the insensitive way Comey was fired have treated Republicans with utter contempt….
Mary Fahl sang the beautiful song, “Going Home,” for the movie Gods and Generals. Such lyrics and tune that reached into my Southern psyche as to remind me of what the fight was all about. They say there’s a place where dreams have all gone They never said where but I think I know It’s miles through the night just…
The social justice jihad to eliminate “white supremacy” was spawned by the successful eradication of Confederate memorabilia. Americans were not overly concerned about the disparagement of Confederate heroes but when the disparagement was turned against the Founding Fathers and Western Civilization in general, they began to take notice. The public finally realized they weren’t witnessing isolated incidents but a well-coordinated…
I have made a discovery. There does, indeed, exist a place where nobody wants to leave. It is possible to breathe there without worrying about what you are inhaling. This place is not infested with joggers or 300-pound shoulder-strap radios, and when you’re driving along and meet another car or truck on the road, that other driver is very likely…
Of the twelve agrarians who wrote the, symposium I’ll Take My Stand, only three are alive: Robert Penn Warren, the poet and novelist, Lyle Lanier, a psychologist and former executive vice-president of the University of Illinois, and myself, a writer and reader of fiction. I don’t presume to speak either for Warren or Lanier, and I don’t know how to…
I was born in the North. Nonetheless, I have instructed my attorney, a most honorable Virginian, that when I die he is to see to it that I am buried in that national cemetery at Gettysburg as close as he can possibly get me to the high water mark of the Confederacy. These instructions are based on conviction—the firm conviction…
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. — THOMAS JEFFERSON A Review of In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson, by Noble E. Cunningham. Jr., Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. 414 pages. With the exception of the driven and depressed Lincoln, no major figure in American history is in…
Those who still think of conservatives as people who clip coupons are badly out of date. Among other things, such a stereotype betrays a lamentable ignorance of the Rockford Institute and its publications. Associated with Rockford College in Illinois, the Rockford Institute is dedicated to the proposition that moral and intellectual integrity are as important to the welfare of American…
Andy Jackson’s famous toast, “The Union—it must and shall be preserved,” is still recorded in most high school U.S. history books. Calhoun’s once equally famous reply, “Next to our liberties, most dear,” has slipped out of many recent editions. Like most of the South, Calhoun was on the losing side of the liberty versus union debate. After the Second War…
A Review of: The American Presidency: An Intellectual History by Forrest McDonald Kansas, 1994. Since the surrender at Appomattox, the South has been virtually excluded from two of the three branches of the national government. We can count on the fingers of one hand the number of Southerners who have been appointed to the Supreme Court or elected to the…
Many of the destructive ideas and “isms” of our century in America had their roots in the 18th and 19th centuries, and a number of Southern writers and clergymen recognized their nature and warned against them. Among these men was Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898) of Virginia, one of the South’s great Presbyterian thinkers. He was the author of a number…
The rejection of the old Prayer Book was something like the demolition of a historic building. For over four centuries it has been regarded as a monument of great prose. It has influenced the English language with memorable images and phrasing. Only the King James translation of the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare have affected our language so…
A Review of My Silk Purse and Yours: The Publishing Scene and American Literary Art by George Garrett, University of Missouri Press, 1992 My Silk Purse is a collection of 36 of George Garrett’s essays and reviews, largely on the American publishing and literary scene. The essays are rather tightly a unit, having an underlying philosophy which provides the measure…
The great body of the nation has no real interest in party. — James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, 1838 The American presidency offers many fascinating questions for historical exploration. And by historical exploration I do not mean the all-too-common form of pseudohistory that puts the presidential office at the center of our experience as a people. That scenario in…
Abraham Lincoln and George Washington stare silently at one another across the reflecting pool on the National Mall in Washington D.C., their paths inextricably linked by the historians who consider both to be the greatest presidents in American history. One is a monument, a testament to the man and his influence on American history, the other a memorial to the…
Of the four Christmas cards I received from the UK this past December, three of them had the same request: explain the Trump phenomenon. This is my reply: America has had a bloodless revolution. It remains to be seen what will really happen once the New People take over Washington. No doubt much can (and maybe will) go wrong, but…
I am a Georgian and a University of Georgia alumni. I have been a fan of all the Atlanta sports franchises since I was a kid, and I was a huge fan of the Georgia Bulldogs even before I went there. Needless to say, I was very disappointed by the outcome of the Super Bowl, and since Atlanta/Georgia is a…
I am always glad to talk about my favourite subject–-John C. Calhoun. I think it will become apparent that what he has to say has some relevance to our topic “Building Communities of Resistance”—and perhaps in surprising ways that have little to do with the familiar lessons of State rights and nullification. By the way, despite what you may hear…
It seems that out in California an impressively large number of people are petitioning for a referendum on secession. While I don’t think much of their motive, I say more power to them. The motivation is, of course, fear by California leftists and foreigners that the 2016 federal election has deprived them of the excessive influence they have exercised over…
Fredrika Bremer calls the subject of this sketch her “sweet Rose of Florida.” She certainly is a “Rose that all are praising.” It would require the scope of a full biography to change this rose into a bud, and then, petal by petal, to unfold the bud again to the rose; after all, we might not find the dew-drop at…
Stonewall lay dying of his wounds at Chancellorsville — “the most successful movement of my life,” he murmured, and then remembered to give full credit to God. “I feel His hand led me.” He had smashed Fighting Joe Hooker and 134,000 invaders of Virginia with 60,000 Confederates. Jackson didn’t mention General Robert E. Lee who was with the reserves that…
Three long ringing signals from I the driver’s horn, and the hunt was over. I quit my stand and met Dad on the road back of our line. We had both seen a doe that had kept us on our toes for a while, but otherwise, the drive had been uneventful. We fell quiet and listened. Then Dad asked if…
I write not as an expert to tell you of my thought but to explain a particular concept of Lewis’s and my own application of it to the Old South. Almost everyone knows something about C.S. Lewis as a writer of extremely readable children’s books (about the land of Narnia that can be entered through the back of an old…
An article by a Canadian historian in a recent issue of the North Carolina Historical Review lays to rest an old canard—the charge that during the War for Southern Independence North Carolina soldiers were notable for desertion. After an exhaustive study of all available records, Professor Richard Reid concluded that it simply is not so. North Carolina had more…
This essay was presented at the 2016 Abbeville Institute Summer School. When I was young I used to read a lot of books about archaeology—the study of ancient lost worlds and civilizations. I never got to study archaeology, but I became an archivist, and I suppose my job is a little like field archaeology—except that I work indoors, in air-conditioned…
It is generally thought that when the earliest Homo sapiens arrived on the scene in Africa and Asia less than a hundred-thousand years ago, all of North and South America was devoid of human habitation. Most in the scientific community also contend that it was no more than twenty to thirty-thousand years ago, as the glaciers from the last Ice…
Discussing immigration and sanctuary cities, Bill O’Reilly began speaking of the coming clash of two “sovereignties”, the States individually and the national government, but never got to finish his sentence. Speaker Gingrich interrupted to say, “there is one sovereignty” in America and that’s the national government. “The Civil War settled the sovereignty question.” Unfortunately, the Speaker is correct. We need…
One of my favorite authors, James Everett Kibler, has the consummate perception of localism; the single thing that I believe even Yankees have, though many act as if they don’t understand its basic concept. Fact is, many Southerners have lost its influence as many have left home to rally ‘round the cable-news actors and Washingtonian legerdemain handymen. I read Our…
After its usual clichéd arguments weren’t lessening Trump’s momentum, the mainstream media tried to associate his supporters with its negative caricature of Southerners. The mainstream media has had success in this “Southern strategy” in the past, so it thought it could smear Donald Trump by associating him with its version of a maleovent South. But this time it didn’t work. The…
Legal “scholar” Akil Reed Amar made waves recently by arguing that a single comment from James Madison proves that the Electoral College had an intrinsic pro-slavery bent and was designed to perpetuate the institution. According to Amar, Madison suggested that Virginia’s stature would be hindered by a national popular vote for president, an idea proposed in the Philadelphia Convention by…
In the Partisan’s last issue, I raised the question of why the United States has not been troubled in this century by regional nationalisms of the sort that are currently disturbing most other industrialized countries. In particular, I asked, why has there not been a serious version of Southern nationalism? Answering my own question, I suggested that (1) the outcome…
A biographer defined Francis Butler Simkins as “one of the most interesting intellectual forces of his generation.” As a scholar who questioned conventional thinking he “helped lay the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet, when these momentous events of the 1950s and 1960s challenged the traditional order in the American South, Simkins discovered much…that he believed should be conserved…
Martin Scorcese, in an interview, candidly described his new film, “Gangs of New York,” as an “opera.” He had been asked whether the events portrayed were true to history. I took his reply to mean that the events of the movie were selected and organized for dramatic emphasis and were not to be taken as literal factual record. And, indeed,…
Every night he watched them, this strange trio, the two men and the woman (that is what it looked like, a woman, that is what it appeared to be in the darkness), make their way by foot along the side of the highway and go over the railroad tracks and disappear to goodness knew where. Then, maybe an hour or…
The polls show that 33 per cent of the public still gives Dubya Bush a favourable approval rating. Who could these people be? Some of them, no doubt, are well-meaning dupes in the early stages of Alzheimers. But there is a hard core of latent fascism out there. Though they deviously misuse the idea to slander opposition, leftists are not…
Reprinted from The Deliberate Agrarian. We are not called to be slaves. In My Previous Blog Post I wrote about the family economy and posted Returning To The Family Economy, a chapter from a book I wrote in 2005. My premise is, as the title of this essay states, that a family economy is the biblical imperative. An “imperative” is an essential or urgent…
When I was active in College Democrats at my small state college, in the early 2000s, we didn’t quite fancy ourselves revolutionaries. Middle class origins were universal; collared shirts were frequent; raised fists were nonexistent. Many of our meetings and events were, like so much else in college, little more than excuses to drink beer. We didn’t aspire to bring…
The Union League is one of the most cryptic of Civil War and Reconstruction era topics even though it was a wellspring of tyranny. Together with the Loyal League identical twin, Southern chapters prompted the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to evolve from an obscure social club into a violent anti-Republican, and therefore anti-black, vigilante group. The first Union Leagues lodges were formed in…
Reprinted from brionmcclanahan.com As the first leg of the American invasion force rolled through Iraq in 2003, Sergeant Brad Colbert of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the United States Marine Corps leaned out the window of his Humvee and urged the Iraqi people to “vote Republican.” This moment was captured by the embedded reporter, Evan Wright, and made famous in…
The mission of the Abbeville Institute, to redeem what is worthwhile in the Southern tradition, is an embattled one. The dominant powers in American discourse today have succeeded in confining the South to a dark little corner of story labeled “Slavery and Treason.” This is already governing the public sphere of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Such an approach not only…
Published in honor of James Jackson’s birthday, September 21. Delivered in Savannah, in February, 1806, by the Author of this work. IT is announced to us, that on the 19th day of the last month, departed this life, at the City of Washington, after a long and painful illness, Major General James Jackson, one of our Senators in the Congress…
This essay was originally published at The Imaginative Conservative and is published here in honor of Carroll’s birthday, September 19. The last of the American signers of the Declaration of Independence to pass from this world, Charles Carroll of Carroll was also one of the most formally educated of the American founders. Living seventeen years in France and England, Carroll…
I was a faithful, Southern fisherman even in New England exile. “Oh, these small mouth bass are fine,” I’d tell them, “but when I was a kid back home in Tennessee,” blah, blah, blah. “Heck, we’d have won that War if our boys weren’t off fishing all the time.” I told tales of smiling Southern bass jumping into the boat…
Of all the phenomena the 2016 election year has demonstrated, none is greater than the proof that this nation is deeply and probably irretrievably split into two political camps with very, very little in common. It is more than blue states and red states, it goes deeper: it is truth, jobs, security, and intelligence on one side and lies, coddling…
Late in August 1965, a young boy not yet eight-years-old stood with his father on the field at Gettysburg near the spot where Pickett’s men formed in the woods. The boy’s father was not a learned man and had an uncertain grasp of the events that took place on that ground more than a century before. “Which side were we…
The dominant historical opinion of the famous debate between Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Young Hayne of South Carolina which took place in the United States Senate in 1830 has long been that Webster defeated Hayne both as an orator and a statesman. According to the legend, Webster managed in the course of the debate to isolate the South,…
Of the twelve agrarians who wrote the symposium I’ll Take My Stand, only three are alive: Robert Penn Warren, the poet and novelist, Lyle Lanier, a psychologist and former executive vice-president of the University of Illinois, and myself, a writer and reader of fiction. I don’t presume to speak either for Warren or Lanier, and I don’t know how to…
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published at The Fleming Foundation. This piece appeared in the second issue (1980) of the Southern Partisan, which Clyde Wilson and I (along with John Shelton Reed, Sam Francis, and Chris Kopff) had created. I have corrected a number of errors–including the quotation from the film version of Gone with the Wind–made several small verbal…
General Lee was a soldier and leader of men, not a politician. Although several of his decisions as soldier had an important political impact in American history, he seldom discussed such matters. An exception is his correspondence with the British historian Acton shortly after the war. Acton had spent a long career studying how constitutional liberty had gradually developed as…
Delivered at the 2016 Abbeville Institute Summer School. A Frenchman has observed that the qualities of a culture may be identified by two characteristics— its manners and its cuisine. If that is so, then we can safely say that the United States, except for the South, has no culture at all. Aside from the South the only American contributions to…
My friends, there is one issue before you, and to all sensible men but one issue, and but two sides to that issue. The slavery question is but one of the symbols of that issue; the commercial question is but one of the symbols of that issue; the Union question is but one of those symbols; the only issue before…
This essay was published as a new introduction for Lytle’s Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company and is published here in honor of Forrest’s birthday, July 13. This is a young man’s book. To have anything more to say about a book you did fifty odd years ago brings you hard up against the matter of time. The young author…
In 1855 Putnam’s Monthly carried an article by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson describing an African village. The villagers, according to Higginson, were “active, commercial geniuses,” who enjoyed “a remarkable language, and an even more remarkable recollection of proverbs.” In fact, they resembled New Englanders. They were mechanically inventive and commercially fruitful. Their advanced culture was described by Higginson in…
Fr John Strickland, reflecting on the Renaissance of Western Europe, wrote, . . . For Burckhardt, the Renaissance (for the first time a distinct period in history) became the moment of cultural liberation, the breakthrough into the modern age of humanism, individualism, and secularism. . . . At the heart of this breakthrough was the Renaissance’s reflection on the human…
This essay is reprinted in honor of Patrick Henry’s birthday, May 29, from Moses Coit Tyler’s Patrick Henry. The great convention at Philadelphia, after a session of four months, came to the end of its noble labors on the 17th of September, 1787. Washington, who had been not merely its presiding officer but its presiding genius, then hastened back to…
Southern Voices: Poems by William H. Holcombe, M. D. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1872. We hail this volume as a beautiful presage of the future of the South in the department of poetry In saying that it is worthy of the author, who, for several years past, has been a brilliant star in the literary firmament of the…
Delivered May 6, 2016 in Columbia, SC. Archibald MacLeish was a 20th century poet, author and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote the following about the lost soldier: We were young. We have died. Remember us. We have done what we could but until It is finished it is not done. We have given our lives but until…
Throughout the entire South, our Confederate Southern heritage is under massive attack. This time, it’s not just Yankee invaders who are doing this under a new Reconstruction; it’s being reinforced as well by influential Southern liberals who hate the traditional South. There’s a line that can’t be crossed. Jesus gave us an injunction to love our enemies, but this doesn’t…
Friedich Nietzsche’s statement: “There are no facts, only interpretations” is essentially true about social sciences and social issues. But, although historians’ views of the past are interpretations, they are based on serious research into sources of evidence that are felt to be reliable. Similarly, in legal proceedings, the burden of proof is on the accuser, who must present a preponderance…
Richard Henry Wilde (1789-1847) was regarded as one of the finest American poets of his day. Born in Ireland, he settled in Georgia and served several terms in the United States House of Representatives as a Democratic-Republican and later Jacksonian Democrat. He supported William H. Crawford for president in 1824. Wilde left the United States for Europe in 1835 then…
This essay is the introduction to Mr. Kilpatrick’s The Sovereign States (Regnery, 1957). AMONG the more melancholy aspects of the genteel world we live in is a slow decline in the enjoyment that men once found in the combat of ideas, free and unrestrained. Competition of any sort, indeed, seems to be regarded these days, in our schools and elsewhere,…
The PC police have found a new target. Not satisfied with monuments and flags, the Maryland general assembly recently voted to alter the lyrics to the official State song, James Ryder Randall’s “Maryland, My Maryland.” Lincoln apologist Christian McWhirter penned a piece for Time magazine that labeled the song “dissident.” This is true if using the standard definition of the word,…
From time to time an unsuspecting tourist visiting the ruins of the Old Sheldon Church will insist that they caught a glimpse of a spectral figure hovering among the scattered remains of the time-weathered gravestones. Some might scoff at such sightings, but the reports of the ghost are consistent. Witnesses describe what appears to be the ethereal figure of a…
The following is a transcription of a speech given at the inaugural Education Conference of the Alabama Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans: ‘The best men of the South have long desired to do away with the institution and were quite willing to see it abolished.’ – Robert E. Lee ‘Most informed men realized that slavery was not…
As Baltimore is preparing to honor a coprophagic crossdresser, the city’s double-equestrian Lee-Jackson monument is coming down. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who presided over and encouraged the riots following the death of Freddie Gray last year, is expected to direct its removal from Wyman Park where the monument, the site of many Lee-Jackson Day celebrations, has stood since 1948. …
Mr. Newhouse’s daughter in Atlanta no longer knew what to do about her younger son, Kyle. He was completely out of control. He violated curfew regularly. He cultivated distasteful friends and assumed their worst characteristics and generally behaved with unwarranted sullenness and disrespect. He had been given everything, after all: a private school education, trips, without chaperone, to places like…
Over time a man, if he is perceptive, comes to certain conclusions. The most startling is that the greatest truths were spoken to him throughout his life by ordinary men, simple preachers, old men sitting around drinking soda and eating peanuts, his father. These men, if beneficiaries of a culture and community that embraces common-sense as a virtue, know truths…
This essay is a chapter in M.E. Bradford, Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative (University of Georgia Press, 1985). With the time and manner of his death Abraham Lincoln, as leader of a Puritan people who had just won a great victory over “the forces of evil,” was placed beyond the reach of ordinary historical inquiry and…
Mr. President, during the special session of the Senate in March last, when seven States had withdrawn, by the action of their people, from the Federal Union, disclaimed all allegiance to the Government, and organized a separate common government, I took occasion, before the public mind had become excited, to express fully my views of the structure of our Government,…
The origin of the elephant as a symbol of the Republican Party occurred in 1874 after a political cartoon by Thomas Nast appeared in the popular New York newspaper, “Harper’s Weekly.” It was during the congressional elections of that year when Nast, a renowned Republican satirist, drew a picture of the Democratic donkey dressed in a lion’s skin frightening away…
President Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address articulated his philosophical manifesto: “Peace, commerce, and friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none.” These basic maxims were stressed repeatedly by Jefferson, who cherished a commercially free country that would avert the costly European wars of the past. Optimally, Jefferson hoped to avoid foreign conflicts completely. Jefferson had long championed the idea…
Widely praised for his 2009 Cotton and Race in the Making of America, author Gene Dattel recently wrote an article titled “The Untold Story of Reconstruction,” in the September 2015 edition of The New Criterion. Although predicting that the present Reconstruction Sesquicentennial shall result in “reams of material blaming the South for our racial conundrum” he concludes that all the…
This essay is the introduction to Larry Koger’s book, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860. Black slaveholding is a historical phenomenon which has not been fully explored by scholars. Graduate students of history are often surprised to learn that some free blacks owned slaves. Even historians are frequently skeptical until they discover the number of…
This article was originally printed at TheRoot.com on March 4, 2013. One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least…
You might not find Stark Young’s So Red The Rose in current recommendations of novels set during the civil war era, but Young’s novel, published in 1934, was a record-breaking best seller, so popular with the reading public that it was made into a Hollywood film. It differs from most novels in that it doesn’t have a protagonist, nor is…
This piece was originally published on the Canada Free Press. Much to the annoyance of multiculturists, Christmas is still America’s most celebrated holiday, and in the weeks preceding this festive time, traditional Christmas stories will appear on television screens. We can expect to see numerous versions of Charles Dickens renowned tale, A Christmas Carol, O.Henry’s The Gift of the Magi,and…
Gentlemen of the Historical Society of Mecklenburg (1876): Our president has appropriately introduced the series of historical lectures with the inquiry, why so few have attempted to preserve the record of the great events in the history of North Carolina, and to. embalm the memories of the illustrious actors therein. Perhaps, it may not be amiss in me to pursue…
I am writing in response to the recently posted piece at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, entitled “History proves Thomas Jefferson was wrong (whew).” The author of this article drastically overstates Madison’s role in the finalized Constitution. Madison desired a highly nationalistic government, with a national legislature that had general legislative authority, two houses of Congress both of which were apportioned…
The concept of a panacea has always fascinated me, the idea that there is a relatively simple cure-all for a complex set of problems. Panaceas do have mass appeal. Isn’t it comforting to think that there is a simple way to solve complex problems? – But history has proven that panaceas seldom live up to their expectations. We know that…
Several generations after his lifetime Jefferson became best known, as he still is, of course, for these words “All men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Here is another important lesson in understanding history. The American Founders tend to be treated as…
“Cotton isn’t king in the South anymore … Kudzu is king!” Channing Cole, Atlanta Constitution The mysterious disappearance of England’s first settlement in North America, Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Lost Colony” which was established in 1584 on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina, may never be solved, but it is safe to assume that starvation must have played…
‘If only I can restore to our institutions their primitive simplicity and purity, can only succeed in banishing those extraneous corrupting influences which tend to fasten monopoly and aristocracy on the Constitution and to make the government an engine of oppression to the people instead of the agent of their will, I may then look back on the honors conferred…
Do men read fiction anymore? In my youth I remember visiting other boys’ homes and finding novels from their fathers – you know, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming. In my own family there were no books, and I can confidently state that not one of my forebears had read even 50 books, fiction or nonfiction, not even…
This piece was originally published at The American Conservative. When John William Corrington died in 1988, Southern conservatives lost one of their most talented writers, a refined Cajun cowboy with a jazzy voice and bold pen whose work has since been unjustly neglected. A lawyer and an English professor, an ambivalent Catholic and a devotee of the philosopher Eric Voegelin,…
This article is reprinted from Edward Spencer, An Outline Public Life and Services Of Thomas F. Bayard, Senator of the United States from the State Of Delaware, 1869-1880. With Extractions from His Speeches and the Debates Of Congress (1880) and is published in honor of Bayard’s birthday, October 29. The war was fought for the Union. Whatever may have been the hopes or desires of some of…
…… Although I have never Sought popularity by any animated Speeches or Inflammatory publications against the Slavery of the Blacks, my opinion against it has always been known and my practice has been so conformable to my sentiment that I have always employed freemen both as Domisticks and Labourers, and never in my Life did I own a Slave. The…
Recently, I came across a little known case that I wanted to call to your attention. It involves the ancient writ of habeas corpus, which was first recognized in 1215 in the Magna Carta, but existed long before that. In Alabama, the writ of habeas corpus has been codified in Section 15-21-1 et. seq. Code of Alabama (1975). It did…
Note: A version of this paper originally appeared in the Summer 2015 Edition of the Palmetto Partisan, the Official Journal of the SC Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans. The grey riders are gone, but yet they remain. Asleep in our soil, and alive in our veins. Untouched by fire, untouched by frost, they whisper within us, “Our cause is not…
Criss-crossing the South, from Virginia and Maryland to Texas, and from Missouri and Tennessee to South Carolina and Florida, there are thirteen museums dedicated to the myriad oddities of life . . . Robert Ripley’s “Odditoriums.” Almost a century ago, as a reporter for the New York Globe, Ripley created what would soon become the world-famous media feature, “Believe It…
Recent attempts made by the left and the right to make Pope Francis one of “their” own has sparked considerable debate among the political class and their voices in the mainstream media. Pope Francis’s speech before Congress was nothing more than a continuation of themes he has publically endorsed throughout his time as pontiff, namely support for the environment and opposition…
“The one great principle, which produced our secession from the United States – was constitutional liberty – liberty protected by law. For this, we have fought; for this, our people have died. To preserve and cherish this sacred principle, constituting as it did, the very soul of independence itself, was the clear dictate of all honest – all wise statesmanship.”–…
From personal experience I can draw any number of anecdotes that would vividly personify William Price Fox, the South Carolina novelist, story writer, and chronicler of the South who died in April at age eighty-nine, a few days following his birthday, another vibrant person claimed by the scourge of Alzheimer’s. This occurred in 1988. I hitched a ride with Bill…
This interview was originally published at the Fleming Foundation. Prof. Bassani, there was a mass demonstration in Barcelona on Friday. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to proclaim their desire for independence. Why, with all the crises in Europe—Syrian migrants, EU economic woes, and the Greek bailout, to name just two—are people in northern Spain agitating for independence? First…
About the author: Elizabeth Otis Marshall Dannelly (1838-1896), a native of Madison, Georgia, was a published poet significant enough to be included in the book Living Writers of the South (1869). During the War Between the States, she lived in Columbia, South Carolina, where her husband Dr. Francis Olin Dannelly (1823-1880) was on duty as Chief Surgeon. Mrs. Dannelly was…
Few who encounter John Randolph of Roanoke in the pages of American history ever forget that inimitable, irrepressible figure. Randolph, a son of one of the “First Families” of Virginia, was the passionate, principled champion of the rights of the States and Virginia’s way of life, and the sworn enemy of nationalism, imperialism, mercantilism, abolitionism, and various other “isms” howling…
Chapter 29, on “Lives Lost,” in the newly released booklet, “Understanding the War Between the States,” reveals startlingly higher numbers of people who lost their lives as a result of the War for Southern Independence, especially among Southern soldiers, civilians, and blacks. New scholarly works on these topics are the basis for these significantly higher figures. I learned…
When William Faulkner visited Japan in 1955 to attend a literary symposium in Nagano, he noted certain parallels between the aftermath of the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 and that of Japan’s a century and a half later. In an address, “To the Youth of Japan,” Faulkner summed up these mutual experiences by saying; “My side, the South, lost that war,…
Dan Smoot never considered himself to be a Southern conservative, though he was born and reared in Missouri and spent his early adult life in Texas. He was one of the leading conservative voices in the 1960s and hosted a weekly television program titled “The Dan Smoot Report.” There were once principled men who were willing to carry the conservative…
In 1866 Margaret Junkin Preston of Lexington, Virginia, a sister-in-law of Stonewall Jackson, wrote a poem she called “Regulus.” Regulus was a Roman hero who was tortured by the Carthaginians but never yielded his honour or his patriotism. Her verse, which did not mention Jefferson Davis by name, was a reflection on the imprisonment of President Davis—a tribute to Davis’s…
Now that a third Reconstruction is very much underway in the South, it is more needful than ever to know and understand her history and her ways of living. Thankfully, Mrs. Elizabeth Allston Pringle, a South Carolina plantation owner and rice planter (1845-1921), has left us a valuable guidebook for doing such things in her written account of her family’s…
Recently Mr. Donald Fraser wrote a column in my hometown newspaper, the Northeast Georgian, titled “Battle Flag Promotes Hate, Not Heritage.” He opened his article expressing a twinge of fear that he would probably not make many friends. I am glad, however, he is willing to say what he believes even at the expense of offending others, a luxury often…
This article was orgininally printed in the Unz Review and is reprinted here with permission from the author. Yesterday afternoon I heard a black civic leader in Columbia, South Carolina being interviewed about the just completed removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the statehouse grounds. The lady from FOX who did the interview wanted to know about the satisfaction…
This story is for Ben Greer, fellow upcountryman. The South Carolina Upcountry, 1955 He hears them talking through the swinging door. Now what are you crying for? He’s the same. Everything’s the same, I tell you. I know but I can’t help but worry. About what? He’s the same and as healthy as can be expected. You’re a man, Dr….
“Texans! The troops of other states have their reputations to gain, but the sons of the defenders of the Alamo have theirs to maintain. I am assured that you will be faithful to the trust.” – Jefferson Davis, 1861 This ruling was a foregone conclusion. As soon as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg implicitly compared Confederates – the descendants of American…
Just as we have always been told that America was founded by Pilgrims in search of religious freedom, we have also been told that Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence was based on British philosopher John Locke’s theories of “natural rights” and “social contract”. Jefferson was influenced by Enlightenment ideas and ideals but the indictments against the king…
“Way down in Missouri…Journey back to Dixieland in dreams again with me…” – Lyrics from the “Missouri Waltz” (The Official Missouri State Song) by James Royce Shannon. A cultural identity crisis can be an absolutely terrible thing that can often have ramifications that transcend the time in which it was spawned. Such a trend can lead to the cultural destruction…
This essay is published in honor of Abel P. Upshur’s birthday, June 17, 1790. Today, States’ rights are remembered as a legalistic excuse for the preservation of slavery – a part of the past best forgotten. One historian scoffs at the notion of “loyalty to the South, Southern self-government, Southern culture, or states’ rights,” declaring that “slavery’s preservation was central…
Delivered as the commencement address for South Carolina College, 1887. What theme is most fitting for me present to the young men of the South, at this celebration of the South Carolina College ? What shall one, whose course is nearly run, say to those whose career is hardly begun ? In my retrospect I deeply sympathize with you in…
This speech was given to the Young Men’s Society of Lynchburg, August 26, 1838. I Appear before you, gentlemen, in compliance with an invitation which deserves my grateful acknowledgments. To have been deemed capable of offering one thought proper to guide your minds in the pursuit of truth, is an honor which I beg you to believe I highly appreciate….
This piece was originally printed in Southern Partisan magazine in 1986. Some miles beyond Charlotte Court House, in Southside Virginia, one may find his way to Roanoke Plantation, which seems almost as remote as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century. From the Revolution until 1810, scarcely a white man set foot on that plantation.- black overseers and…
This piece was originally published June 3, 2014 at the Abbeville Blog. Senator John Warwick Daniel (1842-1910) of Lynchburg, Virginia was a gentleman’s gentleman. Daniel served in the U.S. Senate from 1887 until his death in 1910 and was known as “The Lame Lion of Lynchburg” after being severely wounded in the War for Southern Independence. He was shot through…
This piece was originally published in Southern Partisan magazine in 1987-88. A few years ago I was shuffling through accumulated litter in my garage attic when I came across some clippings dating from the 1960s. Among them were several letters to Life magazine commenting on an article by Bruce Carton. One reads as follows: Bruce Carton’s article is interesting and…
This piece was originally printed by Southern Partisan magazine in 1990. In the September issue of the American Historical Association’s newsletter, a rave review predicted that the PBS production “The Civil War” might become “the Gone With the Wind of documentaries.” After watching almost all of it, I would suggest Uncle Tom’s Cabin as its fictional alter ego. But let…
This piece originally appeared in Southern Partisan Magazine in 1984. The Thirteen Colonies in their War of Independence had fought for freedom. But the French Revolution (a true revolution of an underclass) proclaimed not only liberty but equality: and that idea was loosened on the world. But liberty (freedom) and equality are natural allies only up to a point, and…
With the Sesquicentennial of the epic war of American history winding down, many may think this War no longer particularly relevant and we can move on to more current concerns. Such an attitude, which I dare say prevails among most Americans, Southerners included, ignores the watershed importance of the War known by any number of names, the “Civil War,” the…
The wife of the president H.L. Mencken referred to as “Roosevelt the Second” provided much of the impetus for the communizing of the Democratic party in the mid-1930s, and could be readily found supporting and speaking before openly Marxist groups like the American Youth Congress, Communist National Student League, Young Communist League, and anti-Franco communists. In a news column she…
The God-fearing, Bible-reading, hymn-singing Confederate army grew out of a Southern soil well cultivated during the long struggle of countless, if largely unsung, preachers to civilize a harsh and violent frontier. Personal piety and Bible-centered family circles bolstered the churches in a successful effort to shape the regional culture. The churches assumed responsibility for the education, especially moral, of the…
A so-called “writer” for al.com, Charles J. Dean, in an article entitled Today Alabama officially observes Confederate Memorial Day: Shame on us seems to be making a living these days off of feeble attempts at denigrating the South by misconstruing the history of the Confederate soldier, his cause and the situation that compelled him to war. This is his second…
This essay served as the introduction to Why the South Will Survive(University of Georgia Press, 1981). OF THE MAKING of books about the South there is no end. This one differs from most in at least one respect—its unembarrassed embrace of the notion that the South is a national asset, a priceless and irreplaceable treasure that must be conserved. The…
Mr. Jefferson is quite passé these days, but ‘twas not always so. When I was a young lad, Mr. Jefferson was still firmly fixed among the America’s heroes, the great defender of the liberty of the states and the individual citizen, now not so much. Jefferson lost his luster among the members of the political Left over slavery, but perhaps…
In 1809 Thomas Jefferson yielded up the Presidency and crossed into Virginia. In the 17 active years remaining to him he never left it. The first volume of Malone’s masterpiece, published in 1948, was Jefferson the Virginian. The sixth and last is The Sage of Monticello. Jefferson begins and ends with Virginia. Keep this fact in mind. It will save…
What to say in brief compass about the South?—a subject that is worthy of the complete works of a Homer, a Shakespeare, or a Faulkner. The South is a geographical/historical/cultural reality that has provided a crucial source of identity for millions of people for three centuries. Long before there was an entity known as “the United States of America.” there…
The late Richard M. Weaver, “now widely recognized as one of the most original and perceptive interpreters of Southern culture and letters, one of the century’s leading rhetorical theorists, and a founder of American conservatism,” crafted many essays still relevant today. He wrote prolifically until his death in 1963. The quote above came from the introduction of a large volume…
Southerners live in the 18th century. This common charge is not altogether false, since the peculiar habits, customs, and meanings of words found often in the American South are found also in 18th century English authors. Such a word is manners. Most English-speaking people and some Southerners use the word now in the only senses current during the past two…
In talking about the Southern political tradition, it is most appropriate to point to the North Carolina Regulators and the Battle of Alamance Creek. This event was, in fact, only one of many such episodes in the colonial South–in the first 169 years of our history as Southerners before the first War of Independence. There was Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia…
This piece is taken from Brion McClanahan and Clyde Wilson Forgotten Conservatives in American History. Two dates changed the course of American political history. On 13 September 1841, the Whigs expelled President John Tyler from their Party, outraged over his “betrayal” of what they considered true Whig political and economic principles. Shorty over two years later, on 28 February 1844,…
There seemed to be little interest among audience members [at a scholarly meeting] in whether the ideas I had presented were true, only whether their application would bring about results they liked. I used to have a running argument with a colleague, a great scholar now gathered to his fathers, during late afternoon seminars catered by the good folks at…
The time is ripe for a rediscovery of Leopold Kohr. Or perhaps better: the time is ripe for the discovery of Leopold Kohr, since few have any idea who he was. A select group of readers might connect him with E.F. Schumaker, author of Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (orig. 1973). Kohr was one of Schumaker’s instructors,…
“When it comes to be once understood that politics is a game; that those who are engaged in it but act a part; that they make this or that profession, not from honest conviction or intent to fulfill it, but as the means of deluding the people, and through that delusion to acquire power, when such professions are to be…
This selection was originally printed in Brion McClanahan and Clyde Wilson, Forgotten Conservatives in American History (Pelican, 2012). Of the Great Triumvirate who dominated American public discourse from the War of 1812 till the mid-19th century, John C. Calhoun was the first to depart the scene, in 1850. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster lived a few more years. In a…
This essay was first printed in the Southern Partisan Magazine, Volume III, Number 1 (1983). INTRODUCTION One hundred and forty years ago, Senator Henry Clay proposed a constitutional amendment to limit the veto power of the president of the United States. Senator John C. Calhoun replied to Clay; and that speech in reply is the most succinct version of Calhoun’s…
“There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.” – Thomas Jefferson, 1826, days before death It is now accepted as a fact that one of the preeminent Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson – the Apostle of Liberty and Reason – engaged in an illicit sexual relationship with one of his slaves, Sally…
In American higher education of the past forty years, I have observed two American histories, and two American literatures – which teach different American ideals and values, resulting in different societies and different vision of what it means to be an American. Today we have a Northern history and a Southern history; we have a Northern literature and a Southern…
Some months back, my buddy Tom Daniel wrote a piece titled “What Every Southern Man Should be Able to Do.” It is a great list of recommendations, and I concur with all of it, which is why I’m swiping his idea and modifying it slightly (Come to think about it, Tom writes some great stuff, so I really should swipe…
A Sympathy for Disunion “This, Mr. President, is not a government founded upon compact; it is founded upon the power of the people. They express in their name and their authority, “We the People do ordain and establish,” etc, from their ratification alone it is to take its constitutional authenticity; without that it is no more than tabula rasa. “I…
As a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and as an eminent lawyer and statesman, Martin defended state sovereignty and the diffusion of political authority. He is usually identified as an Antifederalist. Martin was responsible for proposing several key components of the new government at the Convention, including the Electoral College, as well as earning a lasting reputation as a trial…
Introduction As we are now in the midst of the sesquicentennial of the Union Army’s march through South Carolina—the climax being the burning of the city of Columbia on 17 February 1865—I thought it might be interesting to employ a rather unorthodox, but extremely interesting source to broaden the understanding of this infamous event: Slave Narratives: A Folk History of…
Review of the new film Field of Lost Shoes: I have written before here and here about the treatment of the South in film. A new entry into that dubious field is the recent “Field of Lost Shoes.” It purports to tell the story of the Virginia Military Institute cadets who at great sacrifice participated in driving back the invading…
The lack of interest in the film “Selma” by both the public and the film industry is a healthy sign. It is an indication that the public is growing tired of this particular movie formula (often called the “Mississippi Burning Syndrome”) ; portrayals of racist, bigoted Southerners from fifty years ago. This movie formula has been a powerful opinion-molding device,…
I have called M.E. Bradford the Agrarian Aquinas. He did not write a Summa, but his work as a whole enriched and carried into new territory the message of I’ll Take My Stand on a broad front of literature, history, and political thought. He came at a crucial time when Richard Weaver had passed his peak of influence and the…
BECAUSE I believe that Sidney Lanier was much more than a clever artisan in rhyme and metre; because he will, I think, take his final rank with the first princes of American song, I am glad to provide this slight memorial. There is sufficient material in his letters for an extremely interesting biography, which could be properly prepared only by…
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When…
To the chagrin and mortification of many liberals, Rolling Stone magazine had to apologize for its “lack of accuracy,” otherwise known as a lie, in a highly publicized article. In ‘A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,’ this left of center magazine first reported a total falsehood and for weeks defended their story. After…
“. . . a republican government, which many great writers assert to be incapable of subsisting long, except by the preservation of virtuous principles.” — John Taylor of Caroline The United States Senate, one summer morning near the end of the session in 1842, was busy with routine reception of committee reports. The Committee on the Judiciary reported favorably on…
Malcolm X once famously observed that the violence and racial strife in America was indicative of “the chickens coming home to roost.” For once in my life, I completely agree with Malcolm X. Except I would substitute the words “Yankee Land” for “America,” because the race-related protests and outrages I see on my television are not located in Alabama or…
States’ rights may have been the defining force in Antebellum America, but modern, mainstream historians would have you believe that they were nothing more than a wicked creed cooked up by a few corrupt slaveowners. A review of a recent biography of John Taylor of Caroline referred to his “opprobrium” as the “premier states’ rights philosopher.” It would have been…
Although I have been in exile many years, I am a Tar Heel born and a Tar Heel bred, and when I die I will be a Tar Heel dead. Nathaniel Macon is a perfect subject for a Tar Heel. He is not well-known today, but he is the best possible example of the true spirit of North Carolina. And…
M.E. Bradford said of Southern Conservatism that: “This conservatism is both historic and principled in not insisting on rights anterior to or separable from the context in which they originally emerged—what the Declaration of Independence says, if we read all of it and not just one sentence. No “city on a hill” to which we, as mortal men, will someday…
Part V of a Five Part Series. Part I, II, III, and IV. 1. Taylor as a Liberal “Individualist” Taylor writes that society not made up of individuals is a pointless abstraction: ‘Society exclusively of individuals, is an ideal being, as metaphysical as the idea of a triangle. If a number of people should inclose themselves within a triangle, they…
A Critique of Onufian Revisionism and Jefferson’s “Contradictions” Robert Booth Fowler writes: “The monuments to Stalin that have come down in recent years in Eastern Europe mark the fall of a former hero and the fall of the values the hero supposedly embodied. The situation with Jefferson, however, is different. The values celebrated by the Jefferson Memorial have not lost…
A review of Henry Timrod: A Biography by Walter Brian Cisco, Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickison University Press, 2001. 168 pages. Henry Timrod died in 1867 at the age of thirty-nine from tuberculosis–his end aggravated and hastened by inadequate food and the rigors of eking out a living amidst the charred ruins of South Carolina’s capital city. The newspaper which…
In an ideal world the separate studies of history and literature would enlighten one another. A historian—whether of republican Rome, seventeenth century France, the Old South, or any other subject—would gain insights into an era from its imaginative literature. Insights of a kind to be found nowhere else, for the best imaginative literature is created by the most acute consciousnesses…
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