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Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XV

They call it progress, but they don’t say where it is going. --Faulkner Nothing occurs except the heaping up of tyranny and insult from Washington by the meanest most cowardly and unprincipled lot of men ever assembled together to curse any people. --Mary Custis Lee, 1868 Nothing is more ruinous to a nation than the defective education of its populace.…
Clyde Wilson
April 3, 2015
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John Tyler Son of Virginia

From the Confederate Veteran Magazine, Volume 4, 1916, pages 4-5. John Tyler, distinguished Virginian and tenth President of the United States, has received fitting, though long-deferred, honor from the country he served. Fifty-three years after his death the United States government has erected a handsome monument at his last resting place, in the shades of beautiful Hollywood Cemetery, at Richmond,…
Abbeville Institute
April 2, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

A Southern Tradition: Restraining Bad Government

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…
Clyde Wilson
April 1, 2015
Blog

March Top 10

March was another great month at the Abbeville Institute. Thank you for your support, and please consider providing a tax deductible (to the full extent of the law) donation to help us explore what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition. Here are the top ten: 1. "United States 'History' as the Yankee Makes and Takes It," by Brion…
Brion McClanahan
April 1, 2015
Review Posts

True American Whiggery: John Tyler and Abel P. Upshur

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,…
Brion McClanahan
March 31, 2015
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“His Accidency:” The Indispensable John Tyler

In honor of John Tyler's birthday (March 29), I thought it proper to include a excerpt from my new book, Compact of the Republic: The League of States and the Constitution, detailing the actions of a President I believe followed the Constitution strictly and has been cast aside by history. Called “His Accidency” by his political adversaries to refer to…
Dave Benner
March 30, 2015
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Lest We Forget Southern History

This year, 2015, marks the sesquicentennial of the end of a four-year war between American Southern States and Northern States that supported an aggressive federal government Southerners could not abide. In addition to the appalling loss of lives; thousands of severely wounded men; and war against civilians with massive destruction and theft of their property, this holocaust was unnecessary and…
R.E. Smith, Jr.
March 27, 2015
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The Eternal ‘Rebel Yell’

Recently, a friend sent me a link on the Smithsonian web site to a 1930 video clip with good sonics of some aged Confederate veterans demonstrating how the famous "Rebel Yell" had sounded some 65 years earlier. All those men were at least in their late 80s, most in their 90s.  But their remarkable spirit still showed through. History and time…
Boyd Cathey
March 26, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Hanging with the Snarks: An Academic Memoir

There seemed to be little interest among audience members 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 Jack Daniels. The argument…
Clyde Wilson
March 25, 2015
Review Posts

Leopold Kohr: Prophet of a Coming Decentralization?

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,…
Steven Yates
March 24, 2015
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Modern Bards and Traditional Songs

Southern contributions to American music are so abundant that they can be considered as the bedrock of most all music as we know it today. From Appalachian hill music, Gospel and Blues (both Country and Urban), was birthed Country, Rockabilly, Pop, Motown, Rock and Roll and Southern Rock. All great American music has its roots in the Southern tradition. But,…
Carl Jones
March 24, 2015
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Where the Yankees Shoot You

I used to always wonder if other Southern children were taught the same thing we were while growing up. A particular case in point is a fabulous exchange that was heard often in my family around toddlers who were learning to identify various parts of their bodies. We would ask little kids to point to their toes, and to point…
Tom Daniel
March 23, 2015
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They Lived in the Age of Calhoun

If "history is the essence of innumerable biographies," as Thomas Carlyle wrote, then the historian has the advantage of witnessing past life from beginning to end.  This is a solemn task.  We see the spring and vigor of youth transform into the resolution and candor of manhood.  The winter of life comes quickly, often suddenly.  For some, the impending doom…
Brion McClanahan
March 20, 2015
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Calhoun on American Government, Politics, and War

"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…
Clyde Wilson
March 19, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

“A Senator of Rome when Rome Survived.”

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…
Clyde Wilson
March 18, 2015
Blog

“The Last Roman”: John Caldwell Calhoun

Born in 1782 near Abbeville, South Carolina, Calhoun's educational opportunities were limited, albeit advanced by the occasional tutelage offered by his brother-in-law, Reverend Moses Waddel. After his parents' death and a period of self-education, Calhoun entered Yale College, studying under the arch-Federalist Dr. Timothy Dwight. He proceeded to study law for two years under Judge Tapping Reeve at the Litchfield…
H. Lee Cheek, Jr.
March 18, 2015
Review Posts

John C. Calhoun Vindicated

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…
Russell Kirk
March 17, 2015
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John Mitchel: Irish Confederate

John Mitchel (1815-1875) was a fiery Irish nationalist who was convicted of treason by the British in 1848 and transported first to Bermuda and then to a penal colony in Australia, from which he escaped in 1853. After Mitchel and his family settled in America, he continued his nationalist activism by founding a radical Irish newspaper in New York, denouncing…
Karen Stokes
March 17, 2015
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John C. Calhoun: A Statesman for the 21st Century

Your ordinary run-of-the mill historian will tell you that John C. Calhoun, having defended the bad and lost causes of state rights and slavery, deserves to rest forever in the dustbin of history. Nothing could be further from the truth. No American public figure after the generation of the Founding Fathers has more to say to later times than Calhoun.…
Clyde Wilson
March 16, 2015
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“United States ‘History’ as the Yankee Makes and Takes It”

John Cussons had enough.  It was 1897, and for thirty-two years he had watched as "Northern friends of ours have been diligent in a systematic distortion of the leading facts of American history— inventing, suppressing, perverting, without scruple or shame—until our Southland stands to-day pilloried to the scorn of all the world and bearing on her front the brand of…
Brion McClanahan
March 13, 2015
Blog

White Cargo

White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, NYU Publishing Co., 2008, 431 pages. 978-0814742969. Where’s my reparations payment! If Ta-Nehisi Coates has provided the ideas behind John Conyers’ House Bill HR 40 for slave reparations to blacks, then Jordan and Walsh can provide the same for everyone else. For the truth…
Terry Hulsey
March 12, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Scratching Fleas: American Historians and Their History

There is no group I would rather receive recognition from than the John Randolph Club. I want to thank my valued comrade-in-arms Tom Fleming for this occasion. Tom is the truly indispensable man. Can you imagine a world without Tom Fleming and Chronicles? It would be immeasurably more intellectually, culturally, and morally impoverished than it already is. I would not…
Clyde Wilson
March 11, 2015
Review Posts

Taking Back Thomas Jefferson

“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…
James Rutledge Roesch
March 10, 2015
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Lincoln’s Words and Misdeeds

Reprinted from res33blog.com with permission. On March 5, 2015 a Wilmington StarNews editorial opinion ran the text of President Lincoln’s second in inaugural address from March 4, 1865—this year marks the end of his war against the Southern people, 150 years later. Editors’ titled their view “Words worth repeating.” Typically, Lincoln’s political words didn’t match reality; or truth. Although in…
R.E. Smith, Jr.
March 9, 2015
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Guns, Yankees, and Such

The antipathy of many urbanites who reside in Greater New England (think Old New England and the Midwest) toward firearms and their possessors has always left me puzzled. Aside from editorials and the parade of talking heads, I have come face to face with firearms aversion among some of my wife’s kin. And, being a “nat’ral born durn’d fool” I…
John Devanny
March 6, 2015
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The Professor, the Prankster, and the President

James M. McPherson recently appeared on The Colbert Report to promote his latest book, Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief. Together, McPherson and Colbert more or less made a mockery of Davis – “great Confederate president or greatest Confederate president?” As the Good Book says, “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls…
James Rutledge Roesch
March 5, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

The Treasury of Counterfeit Virtue

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!” —Robert Burns Not long ago, a well-known conservative historian lamented that the American public had not been morally engaged to undergo sacrifice after the 9/11 attacks, unlike their heroic predecessors after Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbour. Wait a minute. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were massive…
Clyde Wilson
March 4, 2015
Review Posts

Southern Core Values

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…
David Aiken
March 3, 2015
Blog

February Top Ten

Thank you for making February the best month in the history of the Abbeville Institute!  Here are the top ten: 1. Do Confederate Veterans Count? by James Rutledge Roesch 2. All Hail Abe! by Brion McClanahan 3. What Every Southern Boy Should Know by Carl Jones 4. When the Yankees Come: Former South Carolina Slaves Remember the Invasion by Paul…
Brion McClanahan
March 2, 2015
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“History is Nothing but a Pack of Lies We Play Upon the Dead.”

Henry Timrod, the greatest Southern poet next to Edgar Allan Poe, the "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy," died during Reconstruction in 1867 at the young age of 38. Dr. James E. Kibler, an outstanding authority on all things Carolinian and a noted author and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Georgia, tells me that Timrod died of starvation.…
William Cawthon
March 2, 2015
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What Every Southern Boy Should Know

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…
Carl Jones
February 27, 2015
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How ‘bout a Little Bourbon with Your Philosophy?

What exactly makes the South, the South? Hosts of scholars have puzzled mightily over this one. Historians might point to the old Confederacy, human geographers might look for the proliferation of Southern Baptist Churches, as well as clusters and distributions of BBQ joints and firearms ownership, while linguists ponder over the prevalence of “y’all” and other Southern speech patterns. The…
John Devanny
February 26, 2015
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Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XIV

I have seen enough of publick men to come to the conclusion, that there are few, indeed, whose attachment to self is not stronger, than their patriotism and their friendship. --Calhoun We are children of the earth. We are not unlike the Titans, the earthborn giants of mythology, who were invincible in battle only as long as their feet were…
Clyde Wilson
February 25, 2015
Review Posts

A Sympathy for Disunion

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…
Vito Mussomeli
February 24, 2015
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Up From Liberalism—Fifty-Seven Years Later

It has been fifty-seven years since the Weaverville, North Carolina native Richard Weaver (1910-1963) published an article in Modern Age titled Up From Liberalism (Fall-Winter 1957-8, Vol. 3, No. 1, p 21-32). In the article he describes his initial introduction to and infatuation with leftist ideology especially liberalism, progressivism, and socialism. His infatuation had its origin in academia populated with…
James Ronald Kennedy
February 23, 2015
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Luther Martin Revisited

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…
H. Lee Cheek, Jr.
February 20, 2015
Blog

Do Confederate Veterans Count?

The following is excerpted from a letter which I sent to my State Senator At the Florida State Fair, Governor Rick Scott and his Cabinet tabled the question of whether Confederate soldiers – in particular, Samuel Pasco, David Lang, and Edward A. Perry – were eligible for admission to the Veterans’ Hall of Fame, requesting the legislature’s “clarification.” The apparent…
James Rutledge Roesch
February 19, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Sherman’s March

The History Channel’s recent presentation of "Sherman’s March" has been rightly drawing a lot of criticism from those of us who care about such things. In theory, historical events should become clearer as time passes and the controversies they involved grow less heated. But that is not the case in regard to the War to Prevent Southern Independence—because the myth…
Clyde Wilson
February 18, 2015
Review Posts

When the Yankees Come: Former South Carolina Slaves Remember the Invasion

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…
Paul C. Graham
February 17, 2015
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February 1865: The Invasion Continues

On February 5, 1865, the last of General Sherman’s troops crossed the Savannah River into South Carolina. That same day, soldiers of the 14th Corps burned the village of Robertville. Determined to punish the “original secessionists,” an army of over 60,000 was now making its way through the Palmetto State on a mission of destruction and pillage. On February 7,…
Karen Stokes
February 16, 2015
Blog

It Could Have Been Worse, Probably

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…
Clyde Wilson
February 13, 2015
Blog

All Hail Abe!

Today we celebrate the birthday of the log cabin born, rough-hewn, rail-splitting, bare-knuckled, “pock-faced, stoop-shouldered, slab-sided assistant storekeeper,” lewd, vulgar, uninspiring, “ordinary Western man” from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s life and image is a series of irreconcilable dichotomies: He had no military experience worth noting—he waged war on wild onion fields during the Black Hawk War and cleaned up the…
Brion McClanahan
February 12, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

The War Lover

The American Enterprise magazine, a slick-paper, coffee-table arm of the neocon publishing empire, has recognized the premiere of the Civil War film epic "Gods and Generals" by devoting its March issue to the Late Unpleasantness. TAE brings out some deep thinkers to examine American history 1861 – 1865 under the rubric "Just War." (Shouldn't there be a question mark in…
Clyde Wilson
February 11, 2015
Review Posts

German Federalism as Punishment or Fiction

Is Germany Sovereign? In the wake of revelations of pervasive NSA snooping in Germany, Germans have been asking whether or not their country is actually sovereign. In a country filled with foreign armies since 1945, this seems a reasonable question. There is a related constitutional question: Was the 1949 Grundgesetz (Basic Law) any kind of constitution (Verfassung) at all? Barely…
Joseph R. Stromberg
February 10, 2015
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Gentleman Bob and the Decline of the South

Coal miners have their canaries; we have colinus virginiánus, the bobwhite quail. Like the canary that goes silent as the oxygen levels in a mine drop, so too has the quail gone silent in large swaths of the South. The decline of Gentleman Bob has been attributed to any number of factors. Wildlife biologists blame the loss and destruction of…
John Devanny
February 9, 2015
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Is Disparaging the South Becoming Passe?

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,…
Gail Jarvis
February 6, 2015
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Southern Discomfort

Late in August 2001 my wife Barbara and I visited the classic Southern city of Charleston, South Carolina. We walked around the old town and observed many historic places. This resulted in the following article I wrote in an opinion column ‘County Lines’ published by the defunct Carolina-Kure Beach Weekly News under my pen-name Sam Stark.  I’ve edited the original…
R.E. Smith, Jr.
February 5, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

M. E. Bradford, The Agrarian Aquinas

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…
Clyde Wilson
February 4, 2015
Review Posts

Sidney Lanier

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…
William Hayes Ward
February 3, 2015
Blog

January Top Ten

Thank you for making January one of the most visited months in the history of the Institute.  Don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter.  Here are the top ten articles from last month: 1. The Martin Luther King Congressional Cover Up: The Railroading of James Earl Ray by Marshall DeRosa 2. Lies My Teacher Told Me: The True…
Brion McClanahan
February 3, 2015
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“Music means harmony, harmony means love, love means – God!”

Though his life was cut short by tuberculosis (he once wrote that his entire adult life, from Confederate soldier to ill scholar, had been spent trying to avoid death), Sidney Lanier left behind a full catalog of poetry for the soul.   His odes to nature, love, God, and the spirit of humanity should be better known among the American public,…
Brion McClanahan
February 3, 2015
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The Bonnie Blue

Scholars who have seriously studied the question of what Northerners and Southerners were fighting for during the so-called “Civil War” have generally concluded that slavery was not a major motivating factor on either side. “Just as most Northerners did not fight to end slavery,” explained the acclaimed historian James I. Robertson, Jr., “most Southerners did not fight to preserve it.”…
James Rutledge Roesch
February 2, 2015
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The Invasion Begins

By mid- January 1865, General Sherman’s campaign in South Carolina had begun in earnest. Some of his forces began moving through the parishes of Beaufort District at this time, and one of their first targets was the village of Hardeeville, where troops of the 20th Corps arrived on January 17th. During their days there, they burned down or tore apart…
Karen Stokes
January 30, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Origins of the Educational Nightmare

John Chodes, Destroying the Republic: Jabez Curry and the Re-Education of the Old South. New York: Algora Publishing. 332 pp. $29.95 (quality paperback) Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry of Alabama (1825–1903) was one of those fairly numerous 19th century Americans whose lives of astounding talent and energy put to shame the diminished leaders of the U.S. in the 21st century. Or…
Clyde Wilson
January 29, 2015
Review Posts

Andersonville From the Southern Side

This entry was originally published by The Society of Independent Southern Historians. The truth about Andersonville is not difficult to ascertain for anyone willing to search beyond the generally accepted story as perpetrated by the war’s victors, anxious to exculpate themselves for the guilt of the death of their countrymen who became prisoners. That story begins with a prison camp…
Becky Calcutt
January 28, 2015
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The Art of Remembering

We gather here today to honor the memory of brave men who willingly faced the deadly fire of war in order to protect their kith and kin—their blood relatives, their friends and neighbors—they fought to protect their kith and kin from the horrors of the invader's torch and sword. General Robert E. Lee was one of the main leaders in…
James Ronald Kennedy
January 27, 2015
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How The War Was About Slavery

In my capacity as editor of the Palmetto Partisan, I keep a very close eye on the news for articles regarding the Confederacy, especially as it relates to South Carolina, in the hope that our staff can use some of this information to produce timely and relevant content for our division journal. To do this I employ a news search…
Paul C. Graham
January 26, 2015
Blog

Vindicating the South

Reprinted from Circa1865.com. The articles of Dr. Albert Taylor Bledsoe would often express “in vigorous language . . . the best types of literature of the conservative point of view” from the South. In battling against the inevitable tendencies of modernity changing the postwar South, he reminded Southerners that their civilization was one to cherish and perpetuate. Vindicating the South:…
Bernard Thuersam
January 23, 2015
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The Calamity of Appomattox

No American historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during…
H.L. Mencken
January 22, 2015
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The Calamity of Appomattox

No American historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during…
H.L. Mencken
January 22, 2015
Review Posts

The Cause of Jackson and Lee

  Delivered at the Blount County Courthouse, January 19, 2015. Robert E. Lee said “Everyone should do all in his power to collect and disseminate the truth, in the hope that it may find a place in history and descend to posterity. History is not the relation of campaigns and battles and generals or other individuals, but that which shows…
Carl Jones
January 21, 2015
Blog

Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson

This essay is part of the chapter "Southerners" in Brion McClanahan's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Real American Heroes. The Northern essayist and Republican partisan E.L. Godkin wrote following the death of “Stonewall” Jackson in 1863 that Jackson was “the most extraordinary phenomenon of this extraordinary war. Pure, honest, simple-minded, unselfish, and brave, his death is a loss to the…
Brion McClanahan
January 21, 2015
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The Martin Luther King Congressional Cover-Up: The Railroading of James Earl Ray

John Avery Emison, Martin Luther King Congressional Cover-Up, The: The Railroading of James Earl Ray. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 2014. The assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, has its various storylines that continue to this day. The recently disclosed 1964 FBI letter to King manifests the establishment’s disdain for King and its attempt to relegate…
Marshall DeRosa
January 20, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Confederate Flag Day

I am honoured to be back in my native State (North Carolina) where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great. We are here on this occasion both to remember our Confederate forefathers and to honour them in their heroic War for Southern Independence. We do right to remember and honour our Confederate forebears, first of all because they…
Clyde Wilson
January 19, 2015
Blog

Robert E. Lee, Southern Heritage, Media Bias, and Al Sharpton

This piece originally appeared on the Canada Free Press. As you can probably surmise by my detailed caption, this article is a collection of random thoughts. It is typical at the beginning of a new year for people to reflect soberly on the state of events, and make optimistic resolutions and predictions for the future. Although I will try to…
Gail Jarvis
January 19, 2015
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Travis Tritt Flies His Red Flag

Country music singer Travis Tritt recently tweeted a controversial comment in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. The tweet was in support of gun owners but at the same time took an implicit swipe at Muslims and the liberal media. The tweet has generated the predictable outrage, but also a lot of supportive replies. It is interesting that we…
Dan E. Phillips
January 16, 2015
Blog

Let the South Ride Again on the Winds of Time

“There is a great story-telling tradition in the South. My grandfather, father, and uncles were all raconteurs, and I grew up listening to their stories, as well as those of other men. There's a touch of oral tradition in my writing.” – Robert Jordan The Abbeville Institute has done a remarkable job of restoring Southern gentlemen-authors to their rightful place…
James Rutledge Roesch
January 15, 2015
Blog

Robert E. Howard: Southern Writer

“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…
Mike C. Tuggle
January 15, 2015
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Yankee Narrative vs. Southern Truth

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…
Walter D. (Donnie) Kennedy
January 14, 2015
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Searching for Jefferson and Finding Ourselves

Why Historians Cannot Readily Situate Jefferson Finding Jefferson’s Shadow In his watershed work The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1961), Merrill D. Peterson argues that our task as Jeffersonian historians is in some sense Sisyphean. Aiming to situate Jefferson—to find the real Jefferson—we merely wind up with an image, a shad-ow, which is as obfuscatory as it is disconcerting.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 13, 2015
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The Battle of New Orleans

The Eighth of January was on everyone's tongue once, in similar fashion to the Fourth of July, for Andrew Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans occurred on this day in 1815, 200 years ago this very day. That there is almost no mention of this anniversary, that only a bare handful have any idea of the significance of…
William Cawthon
January 12, 2015
Blog

Ten Things About Alabama You Might Not Know

I’m still a little chapped about that recent story from Chicago where it’s considered racist to listen to Lynyrd Skynrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” As a child growing up in Alabama, we were always made aware of our troubled past, but we preferred to focus on the positive aspects of our beloved home state as much as possible. Whenever one of…
Tom Daniel
January 9, 2015
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XIII

South Carolina will preserve its sovereignty, or be buried beneath its ruins.  --Governor Robert Y. Hayne, 1832 I have lived too long not to know how reluctantly the clearest proposition is admitted against preconceived opinions.   --Calhoun Justice is truth in action.   --Joubert The primary object of the criminal law is not to secure liberty or privilege, but to take them…
Clyde Wilson
January 8, 2015
Blog

The Cruel Winter of 1865 in South Carolina

January 2015 ushers in the last year of the sesquicentennial of the War for Southern Independence. One hundred and fifty years ago, the first month of 1865 was the beginning of a cruel and catastrophic winter for the state of South Carolina. Having completed his destructive march through Georgia, General William T. Sherman took possession of the coastal city of…
Karen Stokes
January 7, 2015
Review Posts

The Despot’s Heel Was On Thy Shore

Maryland is steeped in the history of the American Union. She fiercely defended her position amongst the thirteen original states as a free, independent, and sovereign state. She was the last to accede to The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The first article of the Maryland Declaration of Rights states, “That all Government of right originates from the People,…
Scott Strzelczyk
January 6, 2015
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The “Hard Hand of War”

The kind of military onslaught that Union Gen. William Sherman unleashed on the South, beginning with his infamous conquest of Atlanta and subsequent "March to the Sea," followed by his capture of Savannah 150 years ago this month, came to be called, in the 20th century, "total war." That meant a war waged with full military mobilization not only against…
Kirkpatrick Sale
January 5, 2015
Blog

The Year in Review

2014 was a remarkable year for the Abbeville Institute. 1. Our well attended Twelfth Annual Summer School focused on the War for Southern Independence. Southerners fought the bloodiest war of the 19th century against overwhelming odds for national independence. About a quarter of Confederate generals were born in the North or in Europe. Why were so many Northerners who had…
Donald Livingston
January 1, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Cincinnatus, Call the Office!

“. . . 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…
Clyde Wilson
December 31, 2014
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XII

Experience has taught me, that in politicks, it is much more easy to gain the battle, than to reap its fruits. --Calhoun I had not realized how offensive the plain truth can be to the politically correct, how enraged they can be by its mere expression, and how deeply they detest the values and standards respected 50 years ago and…
Clyde Wilson
December 31, 2014
Blog

American Conservatives Do Not Understand the South

The cover story of the January/February 2015 issue of The American Conservative titled ‘A Nation of Prisoners’ deals with the high rate of incarceration in the United States. The cover story was yet another opportunity for Washington centered conservatives to remind Southerners of our proper place upon the “stools of everlasting repentance.”  The fact at a national “conservative” journal that…
James Ronald Kennedy
December 30, 2014
Blog

Imagined Utopias of Tolerance

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…
Tom Daniel
December 29, 2014
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XI

It has been a rule with me, from which I have rarely departed, to pass in silence the misrepresentations to which I have been subject, in the discharge of my public duties;  leaving it to my after conduct to stamp the charge of falsehood on them.    --Calhoun Whenever  I  need  a  psychiatrist  I go fly  fishing, holding a boat to…
Clyde Wilson
December 26, 2014
Blog

Christmas Clover

  By Vito Mussomeli and Patrick Ward Inching down the hillside among wet clover, careful not to slip, our amiable air and sun warm your face while beautifully, sparkling dark green bunches cushion your feet. It’s Christmastime in Scottsdale.   I look for 4-leaf clovers. Find none. Never do. They are named ‘trifolium’ as their siblings the 3-leaf clovers. There…
Vito Mussomeli
December 25, 2014
Review Posts

Exclusion of Free Blacks In the North

This piece was originally published at SlaveNorth.com. "ace prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known." --Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America In some Northern states, after emancipation, blacks were legally allowed to vote, marry whites,…
Douglas Harper
December 23, 2014
Blog

Stand Against “Cultural Displacement” of Lowcountry

This piece originally appeared on www.fitsnews.com. When you’re out and about in Charleston, S.C., almost everyone assumes you are not from here or that you do not have ancestral ties to the land. In any place such an assumption is made, that place’s culture is critically endangered. In the Lowcountry, there’s the proposed extension of I-526, which promises to raise…
Strom McCallum
December 23, 2014
Blog

Faithless Government

Robert Barnwell Rhett, born on December 21, 1800, is remembered as one of the foremost "fire-eaters" of the South in the years leading to the War in 1861.  He championed nullification between 1830 and 1859 in order to preserve the Union, but had decided after the election of 1860 that the Union of the Founders had been dissolved and replaced…
Brion McClanahan
December 22, 2014
Review Posts

John Taylor and Construction

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…
James Rutledge Roesch
December 19, 2014
Blog

The Political Wisdom of John Taylor of Caroline

In honor of John Taylor's birthday, December 19. From Tyranny Unmasked: “The rival remedy for our troubles, so insignificant in the eyes of the Committee as to be wholly suppressed, although it has been often enforced by a multitude of able writers, and some patriotick statesmen; and although it was the basis of two federal administrations, which diffused more happiness and…
W. Kirk Wood
December 19, 2014
Blog

The Lady Who Saved Mount Vernon

Born in 1816, Ann Pamela Cunningham was raised at Rosemont, a plantation on the Saluda River in Laurens County, South Carolina.  At the age of seventeen, she suffered an injury to her spine when she was thrown from a horse and was crippled for the rest of her life.  In 1853, when she was 37 years of age, she was…
Karen Stokes
December 18, 2014
Blog

Nathaniel Macon and the Origin of States’ Rights Conservatism

This essay was first published at Unz Review on November 23, 2014. Back in 1975 the Warren County Historical Association initiated a comprehensive project to study the life and legacy of Nathaniel Macon. As a part of this project, both archaeological and architectural studies of his old Buck Spring plantation, near the Roanoke River, were commissioned. Working with the professional…
Boyd Cathey
December 17, 2014
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part X

  What are people for? --Wendell Berry I do not view politicks as a scramble between eminent men; but as a science by which the lasting interest of the country may be advanced. --Calhoun Citizens must fight to defend the law as if fighting to hold the city wall. --Heraclitus Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest…
Clyde Wilson
December 16, 2014
Blog

Infanticide and Hobby Lobby

The US Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) has uncovered a somewhat disturbing reality. Consider the following. In 1993 Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The law stipulates that government may not burden a person’s free exercise of religion unless the burden furthered a compelling governmental interest…
Marshall DeRosa
December 15, 2014
Blog

The Revival of (Southern) Conservatism

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…
Carl Jones
December 12, 2014
Review Posts

Forgotten Founder George Mason

This essay is excerpted from Brion McClanahan's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers and is presented here in honor of Mason's birthday, December 11. If a list were constructed of the most important Virginians in American history, George Mason would appear near the top. His influence on public policy, the Revolution, and the Constitution was far greater than…
Brion McClanahan
December 11, 2014
Blog

The South Hating Business

The defeat of liberal Democrat Mary Landrieu removed the Deep South’s last Democratic U.S. Senator. It is interesting to see the reaction of Yankee liberals (pardon the redundancy) as they complain about the “racist white South” abandoning the Democratic Party. Now don’t get me wrong—I am no lover of Lincoln’s Republican Party but it is amusing to watch the libs…
James Ronald Kennedy
December 11, 2014
Review Posts

John Taylor of Caroline: Liberal, Radical, and Reactionary

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…
Joseph R. Stromberg
December 10, 2014
Blog

Please “Dump Dixie”

Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast believes “It’s Time to Dump Dixie.” Please do. He also thinks that there may be a point in the future when the South should have its independence. Hallelujah, but we tried that once and were forced to keep company with our “kind” neighbors to the North, those like Tomasky who call the South, “one…
Brion McClanahan
December 10, 2014
Review Posts

“Monster of Self-Deception” or “Sentimental Traveller”?

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…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 9, 2014
Blog

The True Fire Within

  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…
Clyde Wilson
December 9, 2014
Blog

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!

A modern student of American literature would be hard pressed to find anything written on or about Henry Timrod in a current anthology of American poetry. Bob Dylan and Langston Hughes will have text dedicated to their work, but not the Poet Laureate of the Confederacy, a man whose verse sparked men to action and whose sweet sorrow at the…
Brion McClanahan
December 8, 2014
Blog

Republicanism and Liberty: The “Patrick Henry”/”Onslow” Debate

The fiercely contested, yet inconclusive election of 1824 set the stage for one of the great debates of American political history. According to Irving Bartlett, “the key to understanding Calhoun’s political behavior and thinking from 1825 through 1828 may be found in the peculiar conditions under which the election of 1824 occurred.”  The same can be said of John Quincy…
H. Lee Cheek, Jr.
December 5, 2014
Blog

Along the Corduroy Road

This piece was originally published at Alabama Pioneers on 3 December 2014. The old home place stood among large oak trees at the top of a hill, more of a rise actually, in the black belt just east of Camp Creek. It was a good place for a ten year old boy to live. It had a good well of…
Arthur "Art" E. Green
December 4, 2014
Blog

Geologists Say

Geologists say Earth’s clay is dust of star. That I believe But not from science chart or learned formulae. Dwarf iris prove it. Blue aster and blue gentian too, Sky-coloured violets By clearest stream, Blue birds’ new spring coats – They’ve brought the heavens down, Have power to reflect, declare All origins.
James Everett Kibler
December 4, 2014
Review Posts

The Transformation of American Citizenship via the Crucible of War

Citizenship in these United States has consistently been in a transformative mode. From early American settlers, through the colonial period to Statehood and nationhood, and through transition from territorial to Statehood status, citizenship was a phenomenon appreciated but not necessarily understood. It was loosely defined, but yet highly valued. This was tolerable within the framework of limited government and widely…
Marshall DeRosa
December 3, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Literature in the Old South

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…
Clyde Wilson
December 2, 2014
Blog

An Easy Moral Superiority over Our Dead Heroes

This article was originally published by the History News Network and is reprinted here by permission. Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain (2012), which depicted Jefferson as a greedy and racist slave-owner, sold well but was given an ambivalent reception. Though the book has been fairly well received by the general public,its author has been censured severely by Jeffersonian scholars…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 2, 2014
Review Posts

They Dared to Die

Address of Colonel Edward McCrady, Jr. before Company a (Gregg's regiment), First S. C. Volunteers, at the Reunion at Williston, Barnwell county, S. C, 14th July, 1882. It is with divided feelings, my comrades, that we meet upon this occasion. It is indeed doubtful which emotion is the stronger, that of pleasure in once more grasping the hands of those…
Edward McCrady, Jr.
December 1, 2014
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part IX

It is not in the power of any single, or few individuals to preserve liberty. It can only be effected by the people themselves; by their intelligence, virtue, courage, and patriotism. –Calhoun Rules in war have purpose. Every broken rule deepens the hate between enemies. Every rule preserved keeps hate at bay. --Christian Cameron I lived this long by never…
Clyde Wilson
December 1, 2014
Blog

November Top 10

The best of November, 2014. 1. Rehabbing Sherman, by James Rutledge Roesch 2. 20 Million Gone: The Southern Diaspora 1900-1970, by Clyde Wilson 3. What Would Lincoln Do?, by Brion McClanahan 4. Reconstruction: Violence and Dislocation, by Clyde Wilson 5. The Republican Charade: Lincoln and His Party, by Clyde Wilson 6. A Lonely Opposition, by Brion McClanahan 7. Painting the…
Brion McClanahan
December 1, 2014
Blog

Conduct of the Northern Army

Lately, media outlets have been giving some attention to the 150th anniversary of General William T. Sherman’s infamous march through Georgia that took place in 1864, minimizing, of course, the barbarity and criminality of his campaign. You only have to read the letters and diaries written at the time of the actual events to learn the truth of the matter,…
Karen Stokes
November 28, 2014
Review Posts

An Upper South Perspective on the Christian Sabbath and Civil Liberty, 1825-1837

Among the various moral reform and benevolence movements in the Jacksonian Era such as temperance, antislavery, prison reform, and the peace movement, one of the lesser known efforts sought to improve the observance of the Christian Sabbath, or the Lord’s Day. Both terms were used in the nineteenth century, the former preferred by Presbyterians and the latter by Baptists, and…
Forrest L. Marion
November 27, 2014
Blog

Tom Watson Brown

Tom Watson Brown was an icon of the Southern tradition and one of its strongest defenders. He was a respected attorney, businessman, civic leader, philanthropist, and, in addition, a very learned man who possessed a library of over 10,000 volumes. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton with a degree in history, and studied law at Harvard. He was also…
Donald Livingston
November 27, 2014
Blog

It’s In The Mud

I have written before here at Abbeville about the legendary music that came out of the Muscle Shoals area in the 60’s and 70’s, and that was before I’d seen the excellent new 2013 documentary film called Muscle Shoals. The film centers mostly on Rick Hall, the founder of FAME Studios, and his influence on everything that happened locally and…
Tom Daniel
November 26, 2014
Blog

The Men Who Destroyed Western Civilization

Whatever happened to Western civilization? Somehow, Christians have lost ground in every cultural area of leadership and influence in Europe and America since 1700. This is an indubitable fact. The remaining Christians search for an explanation. They want to know how it happened. This is the story of the decline and fall of Western civilization. It is the story of…
Valerie Protopapas
November 25, 2014
Blog

The Underlying Realities of Obama’s Amnesty

Focusing on the cultural, political and economic long-term consequences of President Obama’s amnesty executive action obscures placing attention on a more fundamental problem lurking in the shadows of American culture and politics. That problem can best be described as political cowardness. The primary source of this pathetic state of affairs stems from the socialization of the American people regarding race.…
Marshall DeRosa
November 24, 2014
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part VIII

It is the very genius of a consolidated Government to elevate one portion of the Community, while it corrupts the other. --Calhoun Generally, however, the secession movement was a remarkable testament to the compact theory of government, which Jefferson, more than anyone, had fixed upon the American political mind. --Merrill D. Petersen Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately…
Clyde Wilson
November 21, 2014
Blog

Northern Resistance to Abolitionists

Reprinted from Circa1865.com Anti-abolition sentiment was often found north of Mason and Dixon’s line and evidenced by incidents like the 1837 shooting death of abolitionist Elija Lovejoy in Alton, Ohio. The local citizenry tried to convince Lovejoy of his unpopularity by throwing his presses into the Mississippi River three times before resorting to the fatal measure. “One of the earliest…
Bernard Thuersam
November 20, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

The Republican Charade: Lincoln and His Party

"To parties of special interests, all political questions appear exclusively as problems of political tactics." I want to take a look at this strange institution we know as the Republican party and the course of its peculiar history in the American regime. The peculiar history both precedes and continues after Lincoln, although Lincoln is central to the story. It is…
Clyde Wilson
November 19, 2014
Blog

Governor Hicks: Accidental Defender of Southern History

As 1861 drew to a close, Governor Thomas Hicks recorded for posterity the events of the Northern invasion and occupation of Maryland in a message he sent to members of the state's first reconstruction era legislature, an extralegal body that would prove friendly to the Yankee regime. In defending his reluctance to authorize a special session of the previous General…
J.L. Bennett
November 19, 2014
Blog

Rehabbing Sherman

“The amount of plundering, burning, and stealing done by our own army makes me ashamed of it. I would quit the service if I could for I fear we are drifting towards vandalism. Thus you and I and every commander must go through the war justly chargeable for our crimes.” – General William T. Sherman, 1863 “I have felt a…
James Rutledge Roesch
November 18, 2014
Blog

The Left Needs Secession, Too

Self government and the secession required for it in oversized States are as much a province of the Left as of political conservatives. It was the left that raised the question of secession after Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush. They wondered why they had to be yoked with the people and policies of the Red States…
Donald Livingston
November 18, 2014
Review Posts

John Taylor on War, Peace, and Imperial War Finance

Part IV of a Five Part Series. Part I, Part II, Part III 1. War Finance Disillusioned by the policies of his Republican allies, who had leapt unprepared into the War of 1812, Taylor writes: “War is among the most plausible means used to delude a nation into the errour of anticipation,” or living on credit: ‘Yet it cannot bring…
Joseph R. Stromberg
November 17, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Nolan’s Myth of the “Lost Cause”

"Your enemy is not a criminal just because he is your enemy." —Saying credited to the founder of Israeli intelligence. "How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to forgive us all." —Joshua Chamberlain on the surrender at Appomattox. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth Of The Lost Cause…
Clyde Wilson
November 17, 2014
Blog

A Lonely Opposition

This piece was originally published on November 16, 2012 on LewRockwell.com and is reprinted here by permission. On 20 March 1861, United States Senator James A. Bayard of Delaware began a three day speech on the prospects of war and the legality of secession. He began by offering a resolution in the hope of avoiding what he predicted would be…
Brion McClanahan
November 17, 2014
Blog

Understanding Jefferson and Sovereignty

The most fundamental elements of government are wealth and power. Their interplay is forever to aggregate to themselves at the expense of the governed. The structure of government comes from the culture and assent of the people. Where is Sovereignty? By reason of the Nature of our Creator, American sovereignty resides solely in people. It is not derived nor can…
Vito Mussomeli
November 14, 2014
Blog

The Despot’s Song!

Southern history contains many fine examples of literary and artistic merit long ignored by contemporary scholars and forgotten by the American public at large, both North and South. Much of this is due to the impact that the War had on the perception of the Southern people. Students in American literature will get a cursory understanding of Southern literature, primarily…
Brion McClanahan
November 13, 2014
Blog

Son of the South

Today, November 13, is the birthday of one of the Troubadours of Southern Rock, Toy Talmadge Caldwell of The Marshall Tucker Band. Toy was born in 1947, grew up in Spartanburg, and like his Father, served in the US Marine Corps, where he saw action and was wounded in Vietnam. He had begun playing guitar as a teen and after…
Carl Jones
November 13, 2014
Blog

All Slavery, All the Time*

*Apologies to Jon White from whom I sole the title for this piece. Invariably, any discussion regarding the causes of the Late Unpleasantness brings forth the tortured issue of slavery. Back when I was a graduate student in the 1990s, there was still some room, though not much, for a multi-causational interpretation of the War, not so much anymore. Much…
John Devanny
November 12, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Tiger’s Meat: William Gilmore Simms and the History of the Revolution

In the early days of the United States, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton remarked: "The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment." The common national sentiment—among American peoples diverse in economic interests, folkways, and political agendas—mainly rested on a fraternal sense of the shared perils and triumphs of the War of Independence, prior to…
Clyde Wilson
November 11, 2014
Blog

Our Danger and Our Duty

Acclaimed in his time as the “Calhoun of the Church,” James Henley Thornwell was a prominent Presbyterian clergyman of South Carolina and one of the state’s greatest men in the nineteenth century. Like many Southerners, he cherished the Union, but came to accept the necessity of secession. Before he died in 1862, in one of his last writings, Our Danger…
Karen Stokes
November 11, 2014
Review Posts

Twenty Million Gone: The Southern Diaspora, 1900—1970

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yKesnaFYUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DkcQ09h2Vo That is Bobby Bare on Detroit and Dwight Yoakam on Los Angeles. Sometimes there are significant movements in history that go unnoticed because they take place slowly over a long period of time and are marked by no major event. The Southern Diaspora of the 20th century is such a movement. Twelve million white and eight million black…
Clyde Wilson
November 10, 2014
Blog

What Would Lincoln Do?

Originally published Nov. 8, 2014 on LewRockwell.com. The Republicans won. What’s next? In a November 5 opinion piece for the Washington Times, Charles Hurt postulates that this could be the “most dangerous two years in 150 years.” President Obama, Hurst fears, now has nothing to lose and will become more partisan as he moves farther to the Left. Hurst contends…
Brion McClanahan
November 10, 2014
Blog

Painting the Old South

As with literature, nineteenth-century American art is dominated by the North and Northern subjects. The Hudson River School, which incidentally found its greatest inspiration from the West, and most American artists of the Romantic period hailed from the Deep North. After the North won the War, the focus for the American mind shifted North and those who had carved a…
Brion McClanahan
November 7, 2014
Review Posts

The Political Economy of John Taylor of Caroline

Part III of a Five Part Series. Part I, Part II. 1. Republicanism and Liberalism Revisited As noted previously, 18th-century Anglo-American opposition writers employed several political languages. One of these, classical republicanism, asserted reciprocal causal relations between power and property such that a republic secures stability and liberty by way of a “mixed constitution” resting on a broad class of…
Joseph R. Stromberg
November 6, 2014
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part VII

The Constitutional power of the President never was or could be formidable, unless it was accompanied by a Congress which was prepared to corrupt the Constitution. --Calhoun Devolution is not an event, it is a process. --John Davies, Welsh nationalist leader And as for unrequited love, it is seldom fatal, Shakespeare having observed with great sapience: “Men have died from…
Clyde Wilson
November 5, 2014
Blog

Southern Preservation

In the South, many people want to demolish a structure if it looks a little ragged around the edges. Eufaula, AL is a prime example. It is not with pleasure that I mention Eufaula as an example of this, but with genuine disappointment and a good degree of despair. The Ballou house on North Randolph Avenue is one of Eufaula's…
William Cawthon
November 4, 2014
Blog

October 2014 Top 10

Our top ten posts for October 2014. If you have not read any of these fine pieces, please do so and share with your friends. 1. “In All the Ancient Circles”: Tourism and the Decline of Charleston’s Elite Families by Jack Trotter 2. The Secessionist States of America by Brion McClanahan 3. Fortress Dixie by Ronnie Kennedy 4. Righteous Cause…
Brion McClanahan
November 3, 2014
Review Posts

Test Pattern

It filled the screen from midnight until dawn After the late show, anthem, station sign In those brief early days of innocence When television broadcast black and white. The pattern was rectangular, abstract, Made up of wheels and numbers, blocks and lines To measure shape, proportion, light and dark, Its soundtrack shrill – the sine wave’s monotone. But centered at…
David Middleton
October 31, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Reconstruction: Violence and Dislocation

The final part in this installment is a lecture entitled, "Reconstruction in the Experience of the Southern People," delivered at the 2009 Summer School. Violence is a big subject in Reconstruction. There was certainly violence, ranging from personal assaults to riots to pitched battles in which people were killed. However, I doubt that it was as prevalent or as decisive…
Clyde Wilson
October 30, 2014
Blog

Thomas F. Bayard, Sr.

Yesterday (October 29) was Thomas F. Bayard, Sr.'s birthday, the next to last member of the great Bayard congressional dynasty from Delaware. His great-grandfather, Richard Bassett, signed the Constitution. His grandfather, James A. Bayard, the elder, served in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and cast the deciding vote for Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 election. His uncle,…
Brion McClanahan
October 30, 2014
Review Posts

Understanding “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: How Novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe Influenced the Northern Mind

The most influential literary contribution to the politics of the northern States during the mid-to-late 1850’s — helping incite State Secession and a horrific four-year war that killed 360,000 Federals — was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1851-52, just before the onset of “Bleeding Kansas.” Likewise, that war’s most influential music/poetry contribution — morally justifying, in…
Howard Ray White
October 29, 2014
Blog

Cell Phone Towers

Cold metal arms, skeletal, sepulchral, Reaching upwards, grasping. Devil's towers topped with devil's claws, Tearing the creation - earth and sky, Wind and water, what is seen, what is not. Scorpion tails, Stinging all with unseen venom. Counterfeit trees for a counterfeit life: Texting, surfing, talking - with the soulless. Where are the trees of living wood and leaf, That…
Walt Garlington
October 29, 2014
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners Part VI

When did the South ever lay its hand on the North? --Calhoun The body of a Confederate soldier was discovered near here a few days ago. I think I will go over and apologise. --Ambrose Bierce, former Union soldier Therefore I charge the young not to despise hunting or any other schooling. For these are the means by which men…
Clyde Wilson
October 28, 2014
Blog

Forty-eight Years as a Southern Nationalist

“Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war!” Occasionally a scene or event will cross one’s path that will set the machinery of memory running at full speed. Recently while watching Bill O’Reilly and Megan Kelly discussing the Federal Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage, my memory machine clicked on at full speed. O’Reilly and Kelly were debating the…
Walter D. (Donnie) Kennedy
October 27, 2014
Blog

A Southerner Repents

This essay originally appeared on Fred Reed's website and is reprinted here by permission. My sins creep up on me, sent by the Devil, and beset me by surprise. I know not what to do. A month ago, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, I sat on the banks of the Rappahannock River, upon which as a stripling I had canoed and fished,…
Fred Reed
October 24, 2014
Blog

Siege of Spite

By October 1864, the city of Charleston, South Carolina had been undergoing a bombardment for over a year. The Federal forces were in full possession of nearby Morris Island, and had all but neutralized Fort Sumter’s offensive capabilities. During the previous summer, Union batteries near Morris Island began sending their deadly fire into Charleston, the first attack on the city…
Karen Stokes
October 23, 2014
Blog

A Front Porch Agrarian

Originally published at the Jenny Jack Sun Farm blog, August 2014. The old man in the long Lincoln Town Car died yesterday. Perry Gene Williams visited the farm nearly every single day, carefully weaving down grass paths, assessing our progress, or sometimes in his evaluation, a lack thereof. He would find which plot of land we were working and slowly,…
Chris Jackson
October 22, 2014
Blog

Kent Masterson Brown and Gettysburg

I just returned from Kent Masterson Brown’s three-day tour of the Battle of Gettysburg. Brown, a member of the Abbeville Institute (listen to his excellent lecture on the fallacy of an indissoluble Union here) was a fantastic guide. Genial and knowledgeable, spending three days with Brown was a real pleasure. We spent three days trekking around the battlefield, trying to…
James Rutledge Roesch
October 21, 2014
Review Posts

The Real Old Time Religion

People in the South who are intuitively attuned to its culture and history suspect that what passes for popular, evangelical religion in the region is not precisely what it has been in the past. Besides the fact that the South, like other parts of the country, is slowly giving in to the forces of secularism, those states from Maryland to…
A. J. Conyers
October 20, 2014
Blog

Football and the South

Are you ready? Hell yea! Damn right! Hotty Toddy, gosh almighty, Who the hell are we? HEY! Flim Flam, Bim Bam, OLE MISS BY DAMN! WARNNING: Blasphemy ahead. College football has long cast a powerful spell upon the minds and hearts of the people below Mason’s and Dixon’s line. Team flags fly from cars and porches openly declaring the citizenship…
John Devanny
October 20, 2014
Blog

The Secessionist States of America

This article originally appeared on LewRockwell.com. For years those who advocated even a scholarly examination of secession were labeled “crackpots” and “fringe radicals” by the establishment. Secession had gone out of fashion with hoopskirts and mint juleps and had been “settled” by the gun in 1865. That argument worked well while the American empire seemed to be the glorious land…
Brion McClanahan
October 17, 2014
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners Part V

I never claimed a victory, though I stated that Lee was defeated in his efforts to destroy my army. --Gen. George G. Meade, Union commander at Gettysburg The army did all it could. I feel I required of it impossibilities. But it responded to the call nobly and cheerfully, and though it did not win a victory it conquered a…
Clyde Wilson
October 16, 2014
Blog

Fortress Dixie

Protecting Our People in the Era of Islamic Terror & Ebola Within a few days after the Federal Empire’s current glorious leader, Barack Obama, calmly assured Americans that there was little danger of an Ebola outbreak in this country, the first Ebola death occurred in Dallas, Texas. A few months after the Federal Empire secretly dispersed thousands of illegal alien…
James Ronald Kennedy
October 15, 2014
Review Posts

John Taylor on Federal and Constitutional Questions

Part II of a Five Part Series. Part I 1. Liberalism Taylor stood on liberal ground in holding that men were a mixture of good and evil. Self-interest was the only real constant in human action.43 He broke with archaic-republican ideas of mixed constitutions and social balance. His key idea was to divide power up so many ways, federally and…
Joseph R. Stromberg
October 14, 2014
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The Southern Environmentalist

If you were to conjure up an image in your head of an exploitive, money-grubbing industrialist with no regards for pollution or conservation, and I’ll bet a Yankee pops into your head. Conjure up another image of an unrealistic, environmentally addicted hippie, and I’ll bet a different Yankee pops into your head. So if the Yankees have a monopoly on…
Tom Daniel
October 14, 2014
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Where Mason Left Us

This essay is in honor of George Mason's death, October 7, 1792. He wrote the foundational words for America. If we listen, he taught us the dream that the import of America is greater, more important than any government of any United States. He continues today as he was in his time, a pulsating presence of cogency, learning and disregard…
Vito Mussomeli
October 13, 2014
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Secession: Remedy for Federal Empires Endless No-Win Wars

As the first American bombs begin to rain down on mud and adobe structures in some far distant land, “patriotic” Americans rush to support “our men in uniform” which actually means that we must not question the empire’s new no-win war. President Obama, the Federal Empire’s current glorious leader, has announced the initiation of yet another imperial no-win war and…
James Ronald Kennedy
October 13, 2014
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Sayings By or For Southerners, Part IV

A good dog needs no pedigree, and if a dog ain’t any good, a pedigree don’t help him none. --Havilah Babcock Southerners are the world’s worst record-keepers. --Havilah Babcock It is true that we are completely under the saddle of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings, as well as exhausting our strength…
Clyde Wilson
October 10, 2014
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Do You Know Billy Davis and His Mamma, Grace? Me Too.

Over the past couple of weeks, a very simple act has renewed my faith in the great Southern way of life, and it involves making a new friend. It all started two weeks ago when my wife decided to sell her childhood piano. It was the piano her mother bought for her when she was a little girl just beginning…
Tom Daniel
October 9, 2014
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We Need No Declaration of Independence

Many current Americans, indeed perhaps most, regard the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 as a premeditated act of violence by South Carolina against the United States Government. They further assume that violence was both intended and desired by Southern leaders in the months leading to the War Between the States. After all, the South should have known that…
Brion McClanahan
October 8, 2014
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The Crime of William Dougherty

During the War Between the States, thousands of Americans were incarcerated for political reasons in various Northern prisons without due process of law. One of these Americans, Rev. Isaac W. K. Handy, kept a diary during his fifteen months of confinement at Fort Delaware, Delaware, and in it he sheds light on a particularly interesting fellow prisoner there. In his…
Karen Stokes
October 7, 2014
Review Posts

“The Sun, of the Southern States Would Set, Never to Rise Again.”

It is a strange fact of modern American culture that when looking at famous people in the political realm of American history, far more often than not the more statist a historical figure is, the more likely he will be to receive the most attention and celebrity. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and, of course, Abraham Lincoln, for instance-…
Carl Jones
October 6, 2014
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Sayings By or For Southerners, Part III

Reality is what continues to exist whether you believe in it or not. --Philip K. Dick There is but one rule if you want to be a man---absolutely but one---and that is to do your level best to reach a clear, correct idea of what is right, and then stick to it and fight for it, in spite of the…
Clyde Wilson
October 6, 2014
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Ron Paul and Secession Redux?

Ron Paul recently opined about Scotland’s recent flirtation with seceding from the United Kingdom. He wrote that the: possibility that people will break away from an oppressive government is one of the most effective checks on the growth of government. It is no coincidence that the transformation of America from a limited republic to a monolithic welfare-warfare state coincided with…
Marshall DeRosa
October 3, 2014
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The (Modern) American Citizenship Exam

These 40 questions have been carefully designed to test your qualifications as a citizen. The test is self-administered, but please be honest. Answer each question with "Agree" or "Disagree." The more questions you can answer with "Agree," the better-qualified you are to be a good citizen of 21st century America. Politicians really care about the people’s welfare. The media really…
Clyde Wilson
October 3, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Small Is Beautiful

When I first heard of the topic "Small is Beautiful," I thought of the wonderful motto of Chilton Williamson's friend Edward Abbey: "Growth is the Enemy of Progress." Abbey went right to the heart of the matter. The false but pervasive premise of American life is that progress and growth are the same thing and are defined and justified by…
Clyde Wilson
October 2, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Please Tread On Me

“Sic Semper Tyrannis.” — from the Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia “I want everybody to hear loud and clear that I’m going to be the president of everybody” — George W. Bush “I hope we get to the bottom of the answer. It’s what I’m interested to know” — George W. Bush A bit of folklore, often retailed,…
Clyde Wilson
October 1, 2014
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September Top Ten

Our top ten articles for September 2014. If you have not read any of these fine pieces, you are missing out: 1. States Rights Did Not Cause the War! by James Ronald Kennedy 2. The Constitution and Secession by Brion McClanahan 3. Sayings By or For Southerners by Clyde Wilson 4. The Original Steel Magnolia by James Rutledge Roesch 5.…
Brion McClanahan
October 1, 2014
Review Posts

“In All the Ancient Circles”: Tourism and the Decline of Charleston’s Elite Families

Few American cities have been so meticulously studied, admired or—for that matter—vilified as has Charleston. There are substantial reasons for this. During the Colonial period Charleston, or Charles Town as it was then, rapidly emerged as the urban center of a plantation culture that would, by the middle of the 18th century, spread across the Southern states to become a…
Jack Trotter
September 30, 2014
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The Sam and Bobby Show

In honor of Senator Sam Ervin's birthday, September 27, from his Preserving the Constitution; The Autobiography of Senator Sam Ervin, Jr., 1984, The Michie Company, Charlottesville, Virginia, pp. 160-161 During 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to present drastic civil rights proposals of the Kennedy Administration. As an opponent of these proposals, he and…
Bernard Thuersam
September 29, 2014
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The Runnin’ Black Bears? No.

“Defeat has not made ‘all our sacred things profane.’ The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead. Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers. It would be immeasurably the worst consequence of defeat in this war…
James Rutledge Roesch
September 29, 2014
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The Constitution and Secession

The Scottish secession vote has led to a great number of pieces about the future of secession and its viability in the United States: 1. Ryan McMaken wrote about it at Mises Daily. 2. Business Insider featured a nice map on several secessionist movements in Europe. 3. Reuters wrote about a “shock” poll that showed one-quarter of Americans are open…
Brion McClanahan
September 26, 2014
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Citizen Faulkner: “What We Did, In Those Old Days”

In honor of William Faulkner's birthday (Sept 25), Clyde Wilson discusses Faulkner as a conservative. This essay first appeared in Clyde Wilson and Brion McClanahan, Forgotten Conservatives in American History William Faulkner is of course a giant of 20th century literature. Study of his works of fiction is an immense and world-wide scholarly industry. Most of the vast published commentary…
Clyde Wilson
September 25, 2014
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FAQs for the New Confederate States of America

Scotland has certainly lit the fire under a lot of folks who are warming to the concept of secession. Of course, many of us here in Dixie have been pretty white-hot about the idea for over 150 years, but who’s counting? If Yankees are considering secession, then it must be legitimate. So I started thinking about how that would actually…
Tom Daniel
September 24, 2014
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Top “Unknown” Southern Rock Tunes, Part II

Part II in a two part series. Part I. 1. Elvin Bishop: Rock My Soul Most people only know Elvin Bishop from the Charlie Daniels tune "The South's Gonna Do It Again," but he had a pretty substantial hit in "Fooled Around and Fell in Love." This tune is everything Elvin Bishop was as a performer. "When you're feeling good,…
Brion McClanahan
September 23, 2014
Review Posts

James Jackson: Forgotten Founding Father

This essay appears in Clyde Wilson and Brion McClanahan, Forgotten Conservatives in American History and is reprinted here in honor of Jackson's birthday, Sept 21. James Jackson did not sign the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. But his heroism in the War of Independence and his exemplary integrity and republican statesmanship in the first days of the U.S. government…
Clyde Wilson
September 22, 2014
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The One Word Answer: Slavery

“What caused the Civil War?” Ever since the close of the conflict, historians have been struggling with this crucial question. Given the profound consequences of the war, asking “how?” and “why?” are worthy endeavors. Lately, however, the cause of the War of Southern Independence has been distilled down into a single word: slavery. Ideology has deposed understanding. This notion that…
James Rutledge Roesch
September 22, 2014
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Scottish Secession and American Self-Government

Ladies and Gentlemen, Scotland voted "No" to independence. The media will have you believe this was a crushing victory. After all, only 45 percent of the Scottish people voted for secession. We should flip that on its head. 45 percent of the nearly 90 percent of eligible voters voted FOR self-determination. The "No" vote barely won, and the aftermath is…
Donald Livingston
September 22, 2014
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Hell At Pea Patch Island

After the War Between the States began, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and during the course of the conflict, thousands of citizens (mostly Northerners) were arrested and incarcerated in various prisons without due process. Thomas DiLorenzo, author of Lincoln Unmasked, wrote that “virtually anyone who opposed administration policies in any way was threatened with imprisonment without…
Karen Stokes
September 19, 2014
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Sayings By or For Southerners Part II

Swagger and ferocity, built on a foundation of vulgarity and cowardice, those are his characteristics, and these are the most prominent marks by which his countrymen, generally speaking, are known all over the world. --The Times of London on “the Yankee breed,” 1862. We sometimes wonder if the Yankees do not get weary themselves of this incessant round of prevarication,…
Clyde Wilson
September 18, 2014
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Free Scotland!

Scotland votes on independence from the United Kingdom today. I’ll be rooting very hard for a yes vote. The primary reason I strongly support Scottish independence is because it will serve as a beautiful illustration of how civilized unions respond when a geographic territory votes to secede. During all the debate leading up to the vote, no one has suggested…
Dan E. Phillips
September 18, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

The Lincoln War Crimes Trial: A History Lesson

This essay originally appeared in Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture. In the previous chapter we discussed the early stages of the North American War of Secession of 1861-63 as the minority Lincoln government attempted to suppress the legal secession of the Southern United States by military invasion. In this chapter we will discuss the conclusion of the…
Clyde Wilson
September 17, 2014
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Vote Wallace and Bruce!

When the Scottish Parliament voted to join the English Parliament in 1707, it seemed the end of Scottish national identity. It was thought that a small country like Scotland could not succeed economically without being politically integrated into a powerful trading country like England. This gave rise to a "small country" versus "large country" debate. Out of this debate,the Scottish…
Donald Livingston
September 17, 2014
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Best “Unknown” Southern Rock Tunes

Part I of a Two Part Series A few months ago, Tommy Daniel and I posted two pieces on the Best Southern Rock Bands and the Best Southern Rock Albums. Most casual Southern music lovers have heard of the "big six" Southern rock bands--Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers Band, the Charlie Daniels Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, Blackfoot, and Molly…
Brion McClanahan
September 16, 2014
Review Posts

A National or Federal Government

Part IV of a four part series. Part I, Part II, Part III. I come now to urge my objection to the jurisdiction of the court. It goes on the ground, that it is not competent to the general government, to usurp rights reserved to the States, nor for its courts to adjudicate them away. It is bottomed upon the…
Spencer Roane
September 15, 2014
Review Posts

John Taylor: Republicanism, Liberty, and Union

Part 1 of a Five Part Series 1. The Relevance of John Taylor John Taylor of Caroline (1753-1824) has a secure, if minor, place in the history of American political thought. Charles A. Beard considered him “the philosopher and statesman of agrarianism” and “the most systematic thinker” of the Jeffersonian Republican party. Indeed, Beard's writing on Taylor, early in the…
Joseph R. Stromberg
September 12, 2014
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Sayings By or For Southerners

While I could never with safety repose confidence in a Yankee, I have never been deceived by an Indian. ---Daniel Boone That cold-blooded demon called Science has taken the place of all the other demons. . . . Whether we are better for his intervention is another story. ---William Gilmore Simms The inclination to command compliance with one’s ideas is…
Clyde Wilson
September 11, 2014
Review Posts

The Original Steel Magnolia

“No wonder men were willing to fight for such a country as ours—and such women. They were enough to make heroes of any material.”- President Jefferson Davis, C.S.A. Mary Boykin Chesnut’s diary is a touching human and intimate history of a civilization locked in a struggle for life or death. Out of respect to her, and to preserve the authenticity…
James Rutledge Roesch
September 10, 2014
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My Father Attends Funerals

For Julian Ivey In a time when the dead are forgotten As quickly as yesterday’s news, My father attends funerals In coat, tie, and mirror-bright shoes. This formality is largely gone now When people gather to see off the dead. They might come in workclothes, Tee-shirts, overalls, and caps to cover their heads. Not my father. A child of the…
Randall Ivey
September 9, 2014
Review Posts

On Implied Powers and the Bank of the United States

Part III of a Four Part Series by the Legal Scholar Spencer Roane written in 1819. Part I and Part II. I trust I have shown by the preceding detail, that the words "necessary and proper," contained in the Constitution, were tautologous and redundant, and carried nothing more to the general government than was conveyed by the general grant of…
Spencer Roane
September 8, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Reconstruction as a Problem in Statesmanship

How do you achieve peace and normal life after a civil war? Of course the War to Prevent Southern Independence was not really a civil war since the South did not want to control the U.S., just to be let alone. Strictly speaking it was a war of conquest. However, it was in spirit a civil war since it was…
Clyde Wilson
September 8, 2014