Blog

Southern Poets and Poems, Part XIV

A series by Clyde Wilson ALEXANDER BEAUFORT MEEK (1814-1865) of Alabama. Meek was one of the most prominent citizens of antebellum Alabama--judge, orator, international chess master, and historian of the early days of his State. He also published two volumes of verse. Selections are from The Songs and Poems of the South (1857). COME TO THE SOUTH Oh, come to…
Clyde Wilson
January 7, 2022
Blog

When does the wisdom of crowds transition to the madness of crowds?

Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal along with Tesla’s Elon Musk and an early Facebook investor, is famed for his thought-provoking questions. One example is a question he typically asks entrepreneurs seeking venture capital from him: “What are you certain to be true that most of your peers would disagree with you about?” Copernicus, for example, might have answered that…
Philip Leigh
January 6, 2022
Blog

Abraham Lincoln’s Pyrrhic Victory

The true legacy of Lincoln usually gets drowned in the perennial gush about a president whose name is synonymous with freedom and the end of slavery. Lincoln’s role in bringing to an end the Jeffersonian ideal of a limited, constitutional government, with powers vested in sovereign states, remains relatively unexamined. The direction in which Lincoln took America is not without…
Ilana Mercer
January 5, 2022
Blog

The Coerced Soldiers of the USCT

“That the negroes did not revolt is one of the incomprehensible features of our Civil War. Every chance for success was theirs, nor were they ignorant of their opportunity for striking an effectual and crushing blow against their oppressors.  Why was it not done? Several potent causes combined to render any widespread insurrection at that time impossible. There was in…
Rod O'Barr
January 4, 2022
Blog

Was There a Real Lynching Threat at VMI?

The subject of lynching, or “lynch law” as it was also called, is a decidedly unpleasant and, often, a morally repugnant, topic. The term lynching has been used more broadly than as a synonym for death at the end of a rope at the hands of a violent mob to include other forms of vigilante activity such as shootings or…
Forrest L. Marion
January 3, 2022
Blog

Barbarians in the Gates

The barbarians have broken through the gates and are now running rampant through the streets. The opening of the Lee Monument "time capsule"--with one preservationist admitting it wasn't really a time capsule because it was never intended to be opened--and the decision to hand over every Richmond Confederate Monument to groups determined to destroy them are just examples of the…
Brion McClanahan
December 31, 2021
Blog

Requiem for Grandma

Growing up on ‘Holt Hill’ in Vendor, Arkansas, I was truly blessed. I had a touch of the ‘Old South’ that I now have oft read of; a true, closed community of my own people who endured hardship, drought and war, and came out stronger as a result. Of the many giants who walked through my childhood, there is one…
Travis Holt
December 30, 2021
Blog

Southern Patriotism and Foreign Military Interventions

Is it un-patriotic for Southerners to question American military intervention? This is a perplexing question for those raised during the Cold War. For us, it was a battle to defeat atheistic communism—an evil power attempting to force its will upon the world. We were raised and educated by the World War II generation for whom patriotism was intricately linked to…
James Ronald Kennedy
December 29, 2021
Blog

The Lee Monument Time Capsule

Governor Northam's henchmen have finally located the time capsule buried in the Memorial erected to Confederate Gen. Robert Edward Lee in Richmond, Virginia.  How shameful and hypocritical that today the Virginia Department of Historic Resources shows so much interest in opening and disgorging the contents of the time capsule in light of their insipid defense of this monument and others…
Cliff Page
December 28, 2021
Blog

Adding Monuments

In a speech to the Georgia legislature in 1866, Former Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens urged, "That wise and humane provisions should be made for " and that they "may stand equal before the law, in possession and enjoyment of all rights of person, liberty, and property. Many considerations claim this at your hands. Among these may be…
Donald Livingston
December 27, 2021
Blog

An Alabama Christmas

Christmas can be both a wonderful and awful time of the year for many of us.  The holiday has become one associated with worries over holiday debt, sadness from loss, concerns over gatherings, and add into that the calamities of the last few years: the pandemic, politics around the dinner table, and now, worries over the supply chain.  Contrary to…
Nicole Williams
December 24, 2021
Blog

Melting Down Art and History

After the Civil War, former North Carolina governor Zeb Vance became a U.S. senator. His Northern colleagues enjoyed his affable nature and sense of humor, and some of them invited him to Massachusetts during a break in government business. While there, Vance attended a party, and eventually required a visit to the outhouse, where his hosts as a joke had hung a…
Jeff Minick
December 20, 2021
Blog

White Supremacy, Yankee Style

In the warped minds of today’s so-called “woke,” even such an evocative holiday song as Irving Berlin’s “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” can take on a far different connotation than when Bing Crosby sang it eight decades ago.  Going back much further in time, the simple “OK” hand gesture which has been in use around the world for well…
John Marquardt
December 9, 2021
Blog

Andrew Lytle and the Order of the Family

Andrew Nelson Lytle—novelist, dramatist, essayist, and professor of literature—extolled the order of the family, which by the 1930s he thought all but spent, precisely because it was rooted in the very concept of divine order that the modern world had decried and rejected. As patriarchy deteriorated, as acceptance of divine supremacy vanished, the family languished, and with it the community…
Mark G. Malvasi
December 8, 2021
Blog

Robert Drake and the Presence of the Past

There are stories, and then there are stories within stories. This is one of the latter. In 1981, upon the publication of Robert Drake’s The Home Place, I wrote a review of it for Modern Age (Fall 1981) which I entitled “A Concelebration of Verities.” I suppose that title captured some element of the book, but as I look back…
Thomas Hubert
December 7, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 290

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 29-Dec 3, 2021 Topics: Tradition, Southern Politics, Secession, Treason, Southern Education https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-290
Brion McClanahan
December 6, 2021
Blog

An Unlikely Prophet: Agrarianism in the Music of Jackson Browne

The flourishing of art is necessary for the preservation of any people or tradition. Over-reliance upon didactic or dialectical methods of communication is trademark of rationalism's withering grip. Artistic expression, whether in architecture, on the canvas, in prose or verse, in works of literature, or in music, possesses the ability to conjure or reinforce the values and traditions of a…
Robert Hoyle
December 6, 2021
Blog

When Baltimore was “An Old Crab Town”

“My shirt is ragged and my pants are tore. I ain’t found nothin’ I’m a-looking for, And I want to go back to Baltimore…. Good old Baltimore.”— lyrics from a country song recorded in 1954 by Sonny James In 1910, when visitors would come to call on Confederate Veteran George Watts, he would “ from a rickety chair” and receive…
J.L. Bennett
December 3, 2021
Blog

Thomas Roderick Dew

Editor's note: The author of this piece won the Bennett History Medal in 1908 for this essay, and was published in the June 1909 volume of the John P. Branch Historical Papers. The Bennett prize is still awarded annually by Randolph Macon College to the best undergraduate history paper. This particular essay displays a depth of understanding even contemporary graduate…
D. Ralph Midyette, Jr.
December 2, 2021
Blog

Secession Isn’t Treason

A few more words, and we shall be in a condition to answer the question which stands at the head of this chapter. Being a legal question, it will depend entirely upon the constitutional right the Southern States may have had to withdraw from the Union, without reference to considerations of expediency, or of moral right; these latter will be…
Raphael Semmes
December 1, 2021
Blog

Mississippi–A Warning for Virginians

The proud folks of The Old Dominion turned their state from Blue back to Red in their recent governor’s election. Even more dramatic is the fact that in the last twelve months, voters in various Virginia counties voted overwhelmingly to keep their Confederate monuments! In nine out of nine ballot referendums, the voters spoke, and they spoke with a loud…
James Ronald Kennedy
November 30, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 289

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Nov 22-26, 2021 Topics: Robert E. Lee, Southern Tradition, Southern History, Southern Culture, Thanksgiving https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-289
Brion McClanahan
November 27, 2021
Blog

Windy

Of all the giants that strode through my childhood, some loom larger than others: Some due to their innate kindness or acts towards me, some for the wisdom they imparted or their willingness to share life experiences, and some simply due to the fact of just how damn likeable they were. But there are a few who loom large for…
Travis Holt
November 26, 2021
Blog

The Ideal Historian of the American Republic

In the future some historian shall come forth both     strong and wise-- With a love of the Republic, and the truth before     his eyes! He will show the subtle causes of the War be-     tween the States, He will go back in his studies far beyond our     Modern dates; He will trace out hostile ideas, as the miner does     the…
James Barron Hope
November 25, 2021
Blog

The Real First Thanksgiving

On Saturday, November 20, MSNBC aired a segment by activist Gyasi Ross comparing Thanksgiving to genocide. "But I'm still trying to find out what indigenous people received of value. Instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence…” he said. Ross’s ignorance and searing rhetoric contradicts the historical record but nevertheless has been fueled by an educational…
Brion McClanahan
November 24, 2021
BlogReview Posts

The Right Side of History

A review of Robert E. Lee: A Life (Random House, 2021) by Allen Guelzo “How do you write the biography of someone who commits treason?” asks historian Allen C. Guelzo in his new book Robert E. Lee: A Life. It’s a bit of an odd question for a historian to ask. Sure, treason is a terrible crime. But so are…
Casey Chalk
November 23, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 288

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Nov 15-19, 2021 Topics: Foreign Policy, Southern Tradition, Southern Symbols, Wokism https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-288
Brion McClanahan
November 20, 2021
Blog

An Able Address Against Conscription

Editor's Note: This speech was delivered in 1917 and was published in the September issue of Watson's Magazine. Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: Deeply impressed with the gravity of this occasion, and an earnest desire to preserve the liberties of my people and our common country, I beg to submit, that — The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United…
H.W. Johnston
November 19, 2021
Blog

The Arrogance of Power

The attitude above all others which I feel sure is no longer valid is the arrogance of power, the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission. The dilemmas involved are preeminently American dilemmas, not because America has weaknesses that others do not have but because America is powerful as no nation…
J. William Fulbright
November 18, 2021
Blog

A New Civil War?

By 1860 our country was so hopelessly divided that it broke up, and only by force was it kept unified. While the North and South had profound political, economic, and moral differences, institutional slavery being paramount, the two halves had a great deal in common, so much so that after the bloodletting and rage subsided, we were able to come…
M.C. Atkins
November 17, 2021
Blog

Rally ‘Round the Flag!

As in the practice of lingchi, the ancient Chinese form of slow and painful execution by a thousand cuts, Southern history and tradition are today dying a similar death. The first of these virtual cuts was inflicted over twenty years ago in South Carolina when the Confederate Battle Flag was taken down from the dome of the State Capitol in…
John Marquardt
November 16, 2021
Blog

Southern Hospitality in Asia

Many years ago I spent five fantastic weeks in Boston during the fall. Though I had heard about the explosive colors of autumn in New England, it truly was a sight to see. So too were the two games I attended at Fenway Park, only a year after the Red Sox swept the Rockies in the World Series. But the…
Casey Chalk
November 15, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 287

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 8-12, 2021 Topics: Lost Cause, Social Justice, Woke, Northern Studies, Slavery, Monuments https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-287
Brion McClanahan
November 13, 2021
Blog

John Rock and Yankee Hypocrisy

John Rock was an American teacher, doctor, dentist, lawyer and abolitionist. Rock was one of the first African-American men to earn a medical degree. In addition, he was the first black person to be admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. On January 23, 1863, John Rock made a speech at the annual meeting of…
Rod O'Barr
November 11, 2021
Blog

Social Time in Old Virginia

Editor's Note: Often considered one of the more important "Lost Cause" post-bellum narratives, Letitia Burwell's A Girl's Life in Virginia Before the War offers a captivating glimpse of life in the Old South. Her grandfather had been Thomas Jefferson's private secretary and her father served in the Virginia legislature ten times. Americans often marvel at the social mores and customs…
Letitia M. Burwell
November 10, 2021
Review Posts

Social Justice is Our New Religion

A review of Christianity and Social Justice: Religions in Conflict (Reformation Zion Publishing, 2021) by Jon Harris Writing during the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy in the 1920s, Princeton New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen argued that Christianity and liberalism are hostile and antithetical religious systems. “In the sphere of religion,” wrote Machen, “in particular, the present time is a time of conflict;…
Darrell Dow
November 9, 2021
Blog

American Monuments

Editor's Note: Former Abbeville Institute summer school student Jon Harris and his Last Stand Studios produced this original documentary about American monuments and the ongoing American iconoclasm. It features Abbeville Institute scholars Donald Livingston, Brion McClanahan, Bill Wilson, Philip Leigh, and Kirkpatrick Sale. From the website: "Our next project, American Monument, will explore the good, true, and beautiful qualities represented…
Abbeville Institute
November 8, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 286

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Nov 1-5, 2021 Topics: Southern tradition, Southern culture, the War, Cancel Culture https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-286
Brion McClanahan
November 6, 2021
Blog

Missouri’s Road to Secession

Missouri celebrated her 160th anniversary of her secession from the Union on October 28. It was that day, in 1861, that both chambers of the duly elected Missouri legislature passed an ordinance of secession in extra session in Neosho, Missouri. The ordinance was signed by the duly elected governor three days later, on October 31, 1861. Missouri was officially accepted…
Wes Franklin
November 4, 2021
Blog

What Did the Founders Intend? Ask a Canadian

Critical to the debate regarding the right of secession is where, in the minds of the founders, did sovereignty reside. Were the States sovereign principals and the federal government their created agent? Or was the federal government sovereign and the States its created agents? State sovereignty prevailed for most of the 70 years after the founding, but political prejudice and…
Rod O'Barr
November 3, 2021
Blog

Southern Heritage and “New Right” Populism

The current conservative populist movement appears to offer some hope of mounting an effective resistance to the corporate state that was established during, and has largely adapted and stayed in power, since the failed War for Southern Independence. While having turned away from the endless wars and being able to effectively mobilize people to resist the political establishment that has…
James (Jim) Pederson
November 2, 2021
Blog

Thomas Moore, RIP

In August, Thomas Moore, novelist and founding Chairman of the Southern National Congress, passed away unexpectedly at his home in Aiken, South Carolina at the too-early age of 73. Tom was South Carolina-born, a graduate of the Citadel and had an M.A. in National Security Affairs from Georgetown University. He worked for 25 years in powerful circles in Washington in…
Clyde Wilson
November 1, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 285

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Oct 25-29, 2021 Topics: Southern tradition, slavery, Robert E. Lee, John C. Calhoun, Reconstruction, Ulysses S. Grant https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-285
Brion McClanahan
October 30, 2021
Blog

A Sham of Free Government

  Editor's Note: United States Senator Thomas F. Bayard delivered this speech in January, 1875 on the 60th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans. Bayard, later United States Secretary of State, considered the military occupation of New Orleans to be an unconstitutional usurpation of power and a direct assault on republican government. He denounced Gen. Philip Sheridan, insinuated that…
Thomas F. Bayard
October 29, 2021
Blog

On “Southern” Slavery

It has become fashionable to bash the South - not only by removing war memorials or looking the other way as they are vandalized, but even in discussions of things like slavery.  It's never just slavery; it's Southern slavery.  The existence of slavery in the North has been whitewashed and sent down the memory hole. Frankly, most of our American…
Rev. Larry Beane
October 28, 2021
Blog

Robert E. Lee and the “Will”ing Bogeymen

George Will writes what amounts to a review of Allen C. Guelzo’s biography, Robert E. Lee: A Life in the Washington Post. The review and apparently the book are disparaging of Lee. Considering who Lee was and the fruitful historical mindsets who have lionized him, both black and white: (Churchill, Eisenhower, both Roosevelts as well as Booker T, Washington to…
Paul H. Yarbrough
October 27, 2021
Blog

Remembering John C. Calhoun

Though John C. Calhoun was a distinguished American statesman and thinker, he is little appreciated in his own country. Calhoun rose to prominence on the eve of the War of 1812 as a “war hawk” in the House of Representatives and was the Hercules who labored untiringly in the war effort. While still a congressman, he was the chief architect…
John Devanny
October 26, 2021
Blog

Poor Poe

At the University of Virginia, Room No.13 on the fabled Lawn is reserved as a permanent shrine to Edgar Allan Poe, who reportedly lodged in the room during his brief time on campus (or “the grounds,” as we say). One wonders what Poe, though a proud Virginian, would think about this honor — he was not terribly happy with his…
Casey Chalk
October 25, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 284

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, October 18-22, 2021 Topics: Southern Tradition, Southern History, The War, Thomas Jefferson https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-284
Brion McClanahan
October 23, 2021
Blog

Disunion Then and Now

The delegates who gathered in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation, presumptuously shelving that document, concluded their work on the proposed U.S. Constitution on September 17, 1787.  On another September 17th three quarters of a century later, the quarrels that had commenced at that gathering were to continue in a cornfield at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. One hundred…
J.L. Bennett
October 22, 2021
Blog

Tradition and Culture

Our farm was a broadly covered area of green stalks, blanketing the ground for hundreds of acres all around. In a slow-motion explosion, day-by-day, week-by-week, the land revealed the white birth of cotton, the king crop of the Mississippi Delta. There were great vines of honeysuckle on one side of the house. The aroma seemed more noticeable in the open…
Paul H. Yarbrough
October 21, 2021
Blog

Patrick Henry: The Real Indispensable Man

After finishing a biography titled, Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty, by John Kukla, I am convinced that Mr. Henry, Colonel Henry, nay, Governor Henry is the real father of our country instead of the beloved General, President George Washington. As I become more familiar with the particular history of Old Dominion and her role and that of her leading citizens…
Julie Paine
October 20, 2021
Review Posts

When in the Course of Human Events

A review of When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Rowman & Littlefield,  2004) by Charles Adams Did the South go to war for sport? Not being a professional historian, my historical toolbox is not large. But one tool has often gotten me to the heart of past events. That tool is to ask:…
Terry Hulsey
October 19, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 283

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 11-15, 2021 Topics: Southern Tradition, Southern Politics, Southern Culture, Southern History https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-283
Brion McClanahan
October 16, 2021
Blog

The Father of Representative Government in America

It is not the purpose of this article to set forth any new discovery, nor to present any reflections which are especially startling or original. The purpose is, to emphasize a neglected fact of American history; a fact attested by ancient records, narrated in historical works, and familiar to historians; yet a fact the full significance of which is not…
William Robertson Garrett
October 15, 2021
Blog

Economic Interpretation of American History

This article was originally published in the May 1916 issue of the Journal of Political Economy. To turn men away from the “barren” field of political history is one professed object of Professor Charles A. Beard in the two volumes which he has in recent years submitted to the public. Other purposes of these interesting volumes are to call the…
William E. Dodd
October 14, 2021
Blog

Beautiful Losers

When T.S. Eliot said that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes, he probably was not thinking of American conservatism. Nearly sixty years after the New Deal, the American right is no closer to challenging its fundamental premises and machinery than when Old Rubberlegs first started priming the pump and scheming to take the United States…
Sam Francis
October 13, 2021
Blog

Eminent Southrons and Cinematic Slander

This essay was originally published in the August 1995 issue of Chronicles magazine. Some folks have been kind enough to notice my absence from these pages, and a few have been even kinder and expressed regret at it. The fact is that my wife Dale and I are working on a book. It will be called 1001 Things Everyone Should…
John Shelton Reed
October 12, 2021
Blog

Who Are Confederate Monument Critics Really Targeting?

The routine removal of Confederate statues signifies a new stage in the evolution of political progressives. Their vision for a new order that can provide social justice for the so-called oppressed is becoming a secular religion. Assaults on statues are symptomatic that the new faith is working to destroy traditional values. The birth of a new religion—even a secular one—is…
Philip Leigh
October 11, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 282

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 4-8, 2021 Topics: Southern tradition, Wokism, Political Correctness, the War https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-282
Brion McClanahan
October 9, 2021
Blog

On the Wane

“Aggressive abroad and despotic at home.” --Robert E. Lee The empire Lincoln built is on the wane. Those who know history can see the signs— And even those with ears can hear the whines And bellows of frustration. All in vain! Empires commence in pain and end in pain. The honest haruspex no doubt divines This course from the beginning.…
Thomas Riley
October 8, 2021
Blog

Steppin Back

The locusts descend upon the land. Not the literal ones, but a kind much worse, in my estimation. The urbanites, long disenchanted with the social upheaval of late, have begun to migrate to the country. My home county, Newton County, Arkansas, is sadly not immune, though we are largely blessed. Rugged and in the remote mountains of northwest Arkansas, my…
Travis Holt
October 7, 2021
Blog

The Reparations Rip-Off

      In the dis-United States today, far too many of its people have now lost all sense of proportion and as movie magnate Richard Rowland said over a century ago . . .“the lunatics have taken over the asylum.” What was formally accepted as standard American history and sociology are now being replaced with the 1619 Project and…
John Marquardt
October 6, 2021
Blog

Our Marxist Revolution

Thomas Carlyle said that it takes men of worth to recognize worth in men (1). Among the many worthy men across Western Civilization who recognized the worth of General Robert E. Lee was Sir Winston Churchill who summed it up, saying Lee was one of the noblest Americans who ever lived and one of the greatest captains in the annals…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
October 4, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 281

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 27 - Oct 1, 2021 Topics: Confederate monuments, War for Southern Independence, Reconstruction, United States Constitution, Southern Tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-281  
Brion McClanahan
October 2, 2021
Blog

Once Upon a Time

The following is an excerpt from an article by a man named Troy Cauley. It is titled “Hindsight” and was first printed in the Southern Partisan over 30 years ago. If one can appreciate anything beyond “modernity” as to life’s heart such as: family, tradition, manners, love, friendship and at the same time cease worshipping gold, silver, technology, “industrial revolutions”…
Paul H. Yarbrough
October 1, 2021
Review Posts

Spencer Roane: The Forgotten Founder

A review of Irreconcilable Founders: Spencer Roane, John Marshall, and the Nature of America's Constitutional Republic (LSU Press, 2021) by David Johnson Of all the leading Jeffersonians of the early Republic—Jefferson, Madison, John Randolph of Roanoke, and John Taylor of Caroline—Spencer Roane is arguably the most obscure. This obscurity is lamentable because while Jefferson and Madison built and led their party,…
Aaron N. Coleman
September 30, 2021
Blog

Lincoln’s Total War

Who has not heard of Wounded Knee? Most know at least the general facts surrounding what is acknowledged as an atrocity committed by the army of the United States. On December 29th, 1890, the 7th Cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers—a spiritual movement of the Lakota Sioux—near Wounded Knee Creek. The soldiers demanded that the Indians surrender their weapons.…
Valerie Protopapas
September 28, 2021
Blog

“Shrines The Heart Hath Builded”

My wife, Elizabeth, comes from a village called Greenwich in northern New York state. Among the keepsakes preserved by her family is a box of letters from her great-great uncle Reuben Stewart, a young draftee who served in the 123rd New York regiment as it marched through the South, leaving a trail of desolation, suffering, and death. One of those…
Barton Cockey
September 27, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 280

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, September 20-24, 2021 Topics: Southern tradition, Southern history, Southern monuments, Southern music https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-280
Brion McClanahan
September 25, 2021
Blog

Terrorists with Planes and Cranes

A lot has happened in the last 20 years.  Reflecting on the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, aka the “Twin Towers” 20 years this week puts recent  history into new perspective. What did the Twin Towers represent to the terrorists?  Perhaps their view of the essence of America - Capitalism. The first terrorist salvo – Yankee soil.  New York. …
Lola Sanchez
September 24, 2021
Blog

The Voices

We’ve all heard some cliché joke about ‘voices in our head’, usually posted over and over again on Facebook or quoted by someone who hasn’t quite figured out just how tired that concept is. But this isn’t about some comic concept of ‘voices in one’s head’, but rather something that has haunted me for some time. I long ago accepted…
Travis Holt
September 23, 2021
Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–The Balfa Brothers

In a significant departure for this series, the 9th installment of What Makes This Musician Great will focus on a band instead of one musician, and more appropriately, a band of brothers.  The Balfa Brothers were a Cajun band of real-life brothers Rodney, Dewey, Will, Harry, and Burkeman.  They learned music from their father, who was a Louisiana sharecropper, and…
Tom Daniel
September 22, 2021
Blog

A Good Southerner is Hard to Find

Perhaps it was after watching yet another film depicting the South as irredeemably backwards and bigoted. Or perhaps it was after reading yet another round of commentaries denigrating Robert E. Lee because Lee was a traitor (so were the American revolutionaries, technically), a defender of a slave owning society (as most societies were before the nineteenth century), and ultimately a…
Casey Chalk
September 21, 2021
Blog

I Will Make My Lineage Known

Regarding Afghanistan. There is nothing to say that has not been said better by those, both believers and heretics, better versed in the theology of the “American century,” the “rules-based world order” over which the “indispensable nation” has presided since the largely peaceful dismantling of the godless authority in Russia. And with what such shambolic and shameful consequence: the collapse…
Enoch Cade
September 20, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 279

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Sept 13-17, 2021 Topics: Robert E. Lee, Southern Symbols, Woke Culture, Southern Education https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-279
Brion McClanahan
September 18, 2021
Blog

Writing History Books Without History

The numerous declarations among "right-wing" websites, blogs, and print publications usually present a conundrum of any given thoughts among them. It is like a string of firecrackers exploding. They are necessarily lighted in sequence but seem to sound in explosive randomness. Afghanistan a catastrophe? Of, course. What do you expect? That is if you are a conservative, what do you…
Paul H. Yarbrough
September 17, 2021
Blog

The Uneducated Antebellum South?

Conditions and Limitations of Southern Educational Efforts. In the discussion of educational interests and educational work in the various parts of the Union, from the colonial period to 1861 and later, a proper account has not usually been taken of the conditions and limitations which controlled educational effort in the various sections. The states at large are, by the facts,…
Robert Burwell Fulton
September 16, 2021
Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–Freddy Fender

Freddy Fender?  You mean that Mexican fella?  No, I mean the Southern musical pioneer from Texas who served in the U.S. Marines, and successfully merged Tejano music with Country music in the 1970’s.  Freddy Fender was the Elvis of Tejano music, and he deserves much more recognition than he ever gets. Born in San Benito, Texas in 1937 as Baldemar…
Tom Daniel
September 15, 2021
Review Posts

Break It Up

A review of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union (Little Brown, 2020) by Richard Kreitner Horrors! Richard Kreitner, a neo-Confederate? How will he, in the stable of Leftist The Nation magazine, founded as a successor to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, ever publish again! One must admire Kreitner’s gift of writing in…
Terry Hulsey
September 14, 2021
Blog

Lee Memorial Ode

This piece was originally published in the Confederate Veteran, Vol. 22, Issue 2, 1914. Replies to the inquiry about the lines, “He did not die that day in Lexington; Fame came herself to hold his stirrup while he mounted,” place them as a part of the beautiful “Memorial Ode” by James Barron Hope, written for the laying of the corner…
James Barron Hope
September 13, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 278

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Sep 6-10, 2021 Topics: Robert E. Lee, Southern Tradition, Wokism, Southern Music, Southern History https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-278
Brion McClanahan
September 11, 2021
Blog

Against the Cruise Ship Historians

The court historian is as old as history itself. Early states were based on the monopolization of information—accounting tablets at first, for taxation, but then “official” histories so that rulers could legitimize their ongoing theft of other people’s resources. Someone had to write these “histories” of the righteous, divinely sanctioned persistence of the ruling house, and thus the court historian…
Jason Morgan
September 10, 2021
Blog

The Journey from Canaan to Carolina

Biblical history tells us that Abrahamic monotheism, the foundation of not only Judaism but Christianity and Islam as well, began some four thousand years ago in Ur, the ancient land that is now southern Iraq. There, the patriarch Abraham made his sacred covenant with God in which the followers of Abraham were to someday inherit the promised land of Canaan.…
John Marquardt
September 9, 2021
Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–Bill Monroe

As I talk to people about American music and Southern music, I’ve noticed that many folks mistakenly assume that Bluegrass is an old genre stretching back into the hills for generations.  In fact, it’s one of the newer genres of American music, and we can trace its beginnings to one man in the 1940’s who single-handedly set all the standards…
Tom Daniel
September 8, 2021
Blog

If We Don’t Take Our Stand Now, It Will Be Too Late

It seems clear to many of us that there are two rising tides in American life these days. One has been called by many names: Political Correctness, “Wokeism”, Cultural Marxism, Theoretical Revisionism, Radical Socialism, and any number of other sobriquets that are all a product of that absurd neediness of powerless “intellectuals” to assert their imagined sense of superiority. What…
Ben Jones
September 6, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 277

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, August 30 - September 3, 2021 Topics: Southern humor, Southern music, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-277
Brion McClanahan
September 4, 2021
Blog

Gaul Was Divided in Three

Editor's note: The following story was told by "Private" John Allen, a Congressmen from Mississippi from 1885-1901. "I want to tell you of the greatest legal victory of my life," said Allen once to a group of congressmen. "It was down in Tupelo, just after the war. I was at that time a practicing lawyer—that is, I practiced when I…
John M. Allen
September 3, 2021
Blog

The Blessings and Security of Self Government

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO ROGER C. WEIGHTMAN MONTICELLO, June 24, 1826. RESPECTED SIR: The kind invitation received from you, on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be present with them at their celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of American Independence, as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate…
Thomas Jefferson
September 2, 2021
Blog

Washington vs. Lee

L. Q. C. LAMAR TO THE VICKSBURG COMMITTEE OXFORD, Miss., Dec. 5, 1870. To Col. William H. McCardle, and others, Committee, etc., Vicksburg, Miss. GENTLEMEN: When, on the occasion of Gen. Lee's death, I received your invitation to deliver an address on the 19th of January next, at the city of Vicksburg, the strongest impulses prompted me to an immediate…
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar
September 1, 2021
Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–Robert Johnson

The sixth Southern musician to be examined in this series of What Makes This Musician Great will be a bluesman that was so good he became a ghost story – Robert Johnson. The Blues is probably the most significant musical form created anywhere in the world in the 20th century, and it absolutely came straight out of the Mississippi Delta,…
Tom Daniel
August 31, 2021
Blog

The Carolina Couch Controversy

Originally published in the March 1998 issue of Reason magazine. Local busybodies target the front porch. In the small-town American South porch sitting was once a nearly universal pastime. As a place for sipping tea or Co’ Cola, smoking or dipping, telling stories, courting, and watching lightning bugs, the front porch was unsurpassed. Southern porches have been celebrated in song…
John Shelton Reed
August 30, 2021
BlogPodcast

Podcast Episode 276

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Aug 23-27, 2021 Topics: Southern tradition, Southern music, Jefferson Davis. Slavery, Southern religion, the War. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-276
Brion McClanahan
August 28, 2021
Blog

The Last Address

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States (Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2021) by Michael R. Bradley and is published here by permission. The Farewell Address of Nathan Bedford Forrest to Forrest's Cavalry Corps, May 9, 1865…
Michael R. Bradley
August 27, 2021
Blog

Jefferson Davis on Slavery in the Territories

The modern academic narrative says that the South’s purpose in secession and war was to “preserve and extend slavery.” Any other purpose is labeled a post-war “Lost Cause Myth.” In a speech on the floor of the Senate, February 13, 1850, Senator Jefferson Davis argued against Sen. Henry Clay’s call for banning slavery in the territories. The speech is a polemic against the reason…
Rod O'Barr
August 26, 2021
Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–Carl Perkins

In this fifth installment of the series “What Makes This Musician Great,” we will travel back to the cultural hurricane in the early days of Rockabilly music, and celebrate the innovative musical giant known as Carl Perkins. As our society moves further beyond those explosive, tumultuous days of the mid-1950’s, it’s becoming easier to lose focus on everything that was…
Tom Daniel
August 25, 2021
Review Posts

Our Comfort in Dying

A review of Our Comfort in Dying (Sola Fide Publications, 2021), R. L. Dabney and Jonathan W. Peters, ed. Dabney “was fearless and faithful in the discharge of every duty. . . . was a Chaplain worth having.”  --Col. Robert E. Withers, Commander, 18th Virginia Infantry Regiment, 1861 In the current American dystopia, the life and ministry of an Old…
Forrest L. Marion
August 24, 2021
Blog

Staying Home

Americans have a weird relationship with their roots. Most folk want to be from somewhere, but they often don’t want to be in that somewhere. As someone who has unusually old roots in Northern Virginia — perhaps one of the most transient parts of the country — I think I might witness this more than most. Few people who live…
Casey Chalk
August 23, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 275

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Aug 16-20, 2021 Topics: Southern tradition, Southern music, the War, Southern poetry https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-275  
Brion McClanahan
August 21, 2021
Blog

American Aurelius

Esteem you for your genius? Just a little— But most of all your people loved the peace That stood behind your fury. In the middle Of your much-troubled heart, there dwelt surcease From trouble’s weight and unrestrained increase, From victory’s excess, defeat’s despair. The calm philosophers of Ancient Greece Had nothing on you, Old Marse Robert, there. Oh, sure, you…
Thomas Riley
August 20, 2021
Blog

So, it was a Civil War after all…

“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. . .” Abraham Lincoln ~ First Inaugural Address I have always believed—reasonably, I think—that Lincoln used this term before ever a shot was fired in order to apportion an equal part of the blame for the war he was prepared to initiate to…
Valerie Protopapas
August 19, 2021
Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–Maybelle Carter

When I was a kid, we had a bully in school who delighted in picking on the girls, for some reason.  No matter what they accomplished, this moron always chimed in with something like, “Not bad for a girl.”  It was definitely not intended as a compliment.  The obvious implication was that no matter what the females think they’ve achieved,…
Tom Daniel
August 18, 2021
Blog

You Lost. Get Over It

The opponents of Southern heritage often repeat the trope: “You lost, get over it.” One of them told me that it was “ironic” that we honor both the US and CS flags. But of course, the postbellum states of the CSA were annexed into the reunited USA. They were forced back into the Union. Therefore, thirteen of the stars on…
Rev. Larry Beane
August 17, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 274

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Aug 9-13, 2021 Topics: The War, Secession, Southern Culture, Southern Music, Southern Monuments, Southern Tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-274
Brion McClanahan
August 14, 2021
Blog

The Truth About Tariffs and the War

During the past thirty years most historians claim that slavery was the dominant cause of the Civil War. They increasingly insist that the South’s opposition to protective tariffs was a minimal factor, even though such tariffs were specifically outlawed in the Confederate constitution. Historian Marc-William Palen, for example, writes: One of the most egregious of the so-called Lost Cause narratives…
Philip Leigh
August 13, 2021
Blog

Historical Context Explains Secession

That Southern secession was ultimately about independence with or without slavery is easily determined by primary sources. Often I hear that the primary sources I quote in defense of Southern secession are “cherry picked” or “out of context.” Those making these charges will then point to the four Declarations of Causes or The Cornerstone Speech as proof of my lack…
Rod O'Barr
August 12, 2021
Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–Ray Charles

In this third installment of the series “What Makes this Musician Great,” I will try my best to explain Ray Charles, but I may already be in over my head.  Previously, I have asserted that music is something that connects you directly to the mental state of the musician, and a vital part of that path involves forming a personal…
Tom Daniel
August 11, 2021
Review Posts

Chaining Down Leviathan

A review of Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government 1776-1865 (Abbeville Institute Press, 2021) by Marco Bassani How is it that America became a “strong but limited” government, and the world’s richest and most free country? That is the central question both considered and answered by Luigi Marco Bassani in his new work, Chaining Down Leviathan: The American…
Dave Benner
August 10, 2021
Blog

The South’s Monument Man

The Ten Commandments of the Old Testament (Exodus 20:2-17) are the creed of both Christians and Jews, but the Second Commandment posed a special dilemma for Jews in relation to the arts.  This admonition states in part that no one shall make for themselves any  . . . “carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above…
John Marquardt
August 9, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 273

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, August 2-6, 2021 Topics: Southern tradition, Southern culture, Southern literature, Southern music https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-273
Brion McClanahan
August 7, 2021
Blog

An ode to the Waccamaw

My heart bled along the Waccamaw, where ancient warriors reigned. I wonder if their spirits saw as I kneeled there, pained. Carolina! She beckoned me to rise, and her warm sun kissed my face. A glory came fore my eyes, which is this Southern place. Hail, you Carolinas of mine, you’ve dearly blessed your son. There’s naught I’d rather be…
Demetrius Garland Bowman
August 6, 2021
Blog

The Old South and the New

This essay was originally published in the February 1936 issue of The American Review. Years ago, during the World War, I traveled from Chicago by way of Cincinnati to Montgomery, Alabama, in the company of a group of young ladies from the North who were visiting their men-folk encamped at Camp Sheridan. None of them had been South before, and…
Frank L. Owlsley
August 5, 2021
Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–Hank Williams

This is the second installment of the series ‘What Makes this Musician Great,” and will focus on the man from Butler County, Alabama – Hank Williams.  In this ongoing series, I explain what makes Southern musicians and their music so great and worth remembering while using non-technical language that can hopefully be understood by non-musicians, and this is the perfect…
Tom Daniel
August 4, 2021
Blog

What It Means to be a Southerner

Editor's Note: In an effort to "explore what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition," we offer an explanation of what it "meant to be a Southerner" in 1958. This raises the questions of what has and has not changed in the South and if themes in this essay can still be applied to the twenty-first century Southerner. This…
Robert Y. Drake
August 3, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 272

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute July 26-30, 2021 Topics: Southern tradition, Southern culture, Southern music, Secession https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-272
Brion McClanahan
July 31, 2021
Blog

The Wild Man

At the top of the hill where my great-grandparents lived, there was a dusty, black and white picture on a shelf. It could’ve been my grandpa or great-uncle, but it didn’t look quite like them. It was a dapper dressed young man leaning over the fender of a ’59 Ford car, posing. I never asked about this picture but it…
Travis Holt
July 30, 2021
Blog

Daniel Webster on the Expansion of Slavery

Daniel Webster was one of the most notable Northern statesmen of his day. He was an American lawyer who represented New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress.  His list of accomplishments is impressive:  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts's 1st district; Chair of the House Judiciary Committee; United States Senator from Massachusetts; Chair of the Senate Finance Committee.…
Rod O'Barr
July 29, 2021
Blog

Disunion Sentiment in Congress in 1794

John Taylor was born in Orange County, Virginia, in 1750, one year before James Madison, and the boys were neighbors; but Taylor afterwards moved to Caroline County, where he lived for the rest of his life, and died in 1824, at the age of seventy-four years. To distinguish him from others of the same name as himself he was called…
Gaillard Hunt
July 28, 2021
Blog

What Makes This Musician Great? – Duane Allman

Recently, I started looking into the connections between musical preferences and personality types.  In the early and middle parts of the 20th century, there were some questionable and unfortunate attempts in the world of substance abuse treatment facilities to use an addict’s musical preferences to predict his personality type and subsequent treatment options.  They tried to correlate musical preferences such…
Tom Daniel
July 27, 2021
Blog

Who’s Your People?

“Who's your people?” Though now somewhat rare, one still hears that question in Dixie, usually uttered from the lips of older or rural Southerners. Much is implied by the question. There is the implicit belief that one’s extended family — or clan, given much of the region’s Scotch-Irish roots — serves as an inextricable part of one’s identity. Also implied…
Casey Chalk
July 26, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 271

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 19-23, 2021 Topics: Southern Tradition, Cancel Culture, Southern Politics https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-271
Brion McClanahan
July 24, 2021
Blog

Monuments

Their carven words all testify Of then and now and future time That these were they who kept the cause Was given them by fathers past And living still in coursing blood. They token men True to lineage. To sons they left high honour and the land, A legacy of action speaking still. Let stone forever warn The men who…
James Everett Kibler
July 23, 2021
Blog

Was the Battle of Liberty Place a “Race Riot”?

Although commonly portrayed as one of the largest mob attacks on blacks by white racists during Reconstruction, the so-called 1874 Battle of Liberty Place in New Orleans was really a conflict between the militias of two competing state governments. The story begins in 1868 with the election of Carpetbagger Henry Warmoth as Louisiana’s first elected Republican governor. To ensure future…
Philip Leigh
July 22, 2021
Blog

Conservatism’s Dixie Roots

It is maddening to listen to people who attempt “conservative thought” with but a shallow mentality for the concept.  True conservative thought comes from the seeds of agrarians and various cultivations in spirit and in heart; the heart of family conservation and the kneeling before God. It is not fractious political parties and preening T.V. personalities lost to history and…
Paul H. Yarbrough
July 21, 2021
Blog

Responding to the Scalawags

If timid and pacified Southerners needed more proof that we are a defeated and occupied people, then indisputable proof was recently provided by the United States House of Representatives. At 7:24 PM June 29, 2021 the House of Representatives passed HR 3005. This legislation requires that all “statues” of Southern “Civil War” heroes be removed from the United States Capitol…
James Ronald Kennedy
July 20, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 270

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 12-16, 2021 Topics: Cancel Culture, Yankees, Southern History, Southern Tradition, Abraham Lincoln https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-270
Brion McClanahan
July 17, 2021
Blog

Monuments According to Pliny the Younger

“To those who are ignorant of the jurisprudence of their country can have no taste for reasoning…” Pliny the Younger Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus was born roughly 61 A.D, to Lucius Caecilius Cilo and Plinia Marcella in a small village in Northern Italy called Como. Pliny became a Politician, a judge, an author, and a revered sage amongst the many…
Justin Pederson
July 16, 2021
Blog

Rules for Northern Immigrants

With the onset of the latest leftist government regime, many Americans are migrating South to escape oppressive taxes and gain other income advantages. Some of you may even be moving whole businesses here. Being the gracious Southerners that we are, our impulse is to welcome you, to invite you in for a metaphorical cup of coffee or a leisurely front…
Leslie Alexander
July 15, 2021
Blog

The Amendment That Never Was

The date of the latest federal holiday, June 19th, was touted as the one marking the end of slavery in America. While few today would argue with the idea of honoring emancipation, the selection of that date in 1865 leaves much to be desired. If one truly wanted to commemorate the legal end of American slavery, the date for such…
John Marquardt
July 14, 2021
Blog

The Cyclic March of History

Hit mus’ be now de kingdom comin’, an’ de year ob Jubilo! ... (1) "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!" has come down to us as the lofty rallying-cry of the French Revolution, but in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities it is rendered as "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death!" (2) and we all know of the guillotine and its work. But Liberty and…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
July 13, 2021
Blog

The Star that is Called Wormwood

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountain of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters,…
Enoch Cade
July 12, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 269

The week in review at the Abbeville Institute July 5-9, 2021 Topics: Cancel Culture, Southern Tradition, Southern Culture, "Lost Cause Myth" https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-269
Brion McClanahan
July 10, 2021
Blog

The Happy Land of Cannan

The happy land of Caannan may be a Biblical story, but for some of us, it truly was fact. Growing up on the land my ancestors settled in the 1850s was a true blessing. It gave me common ground, a heritage, a place and, most importantly, a history. My people were among the first white settlers in the 1850s in…
Travis Holt
July 9, 2021
Blog

The True Cause of the War Between the States

I have been studying the War Between the States for 53 years. In all those years, the one quotation I have read which summarizes the true reason for the differences between the North and the South which led to that war was stated by James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862). He was the President of Columbia Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina,…
Timothy A. Duskin
July 8, 2021
Blog

John Pelham and the “Myth of the Lost Cause”

Some twenty years ago I had planned to write a full-length study of John Pelham—known in the South as the Gallant John Pelham—and the making of myth. The business of earning a living and other distractions, however, intervened to keep that project from being completed. I finally abandoned it as a lost cause of my own. Recently, however, I came…
Thomas Hubert
July 7, 2021
Blog

Aristotle vs. Hobbes–The Cause of the Great War

The "ultimate cause" of the War of Secession was two mutually exclusive understanding of government. The South embraced the view of Aristotle that government was a natural outgrowth of communal man's inter-relationship and that being the case, was at its most efficient and least threatening when limited and local. This nation was more or less founded on that principle albeit,…
Valerie Protopapas
July 6, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 268

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute June 28-July 2, 2021 Topics: Cancel Culture, The War, Southern Tradition, Southern Culture https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-268
Brion McClanahan
July 3, 2021
Blog

A New 4th of July Resolution

The solution offered by Mr Vivek Ramaswamy to the destructive ideology of the Woke Social Justice Warriors could not be stranger: The antidote isn’t to fight wokeness directly. It can’t be, because that’s a losing battle. The true solution is to gradually rebuild a vision for shared American identity that is so deep and so powerful that it dilutes wokeism…
Walt Garlington
July 2, 2021
Blog

Cousin Lucius

The Southern version of Thoreau’s Walden may be considered I’ll Take by Stand, by Twelve Southerners, with its subtitle, The South and the Agrarian Tradition.  It was published in 1930 and met with considerable criticism from those who believed it was a futile effort to “turn back the clock” to an idealized utopia of the antebellum South.  On the contrary,…
Charles Stewart Roberts, MD
July 1, 2021
Review Posts

Lincoln and the Border States

A review of Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union (University Press of Kansas, 2014) by William C. Harris. William C. Harris has set before him the admirable task of examining whether the border states indeed “unequivocally cast their lot with the Union” in 1861 (page 8). Unfortunately, his political views send him into the issue with one hand…
Terry Hulsey
June 29, 2021
Blog

Facebook and Old Glory

Facebook canceled the Abbeville Institute. I was notified on June 10 that the Abbeville Institute Facebook page had been unpublished due to “repeated community standards violations.” Our offenses? We used the image of the Confederate Battle Flag for one post in July 2020 which earned the Institute our first strike. A purely American image that had been the recognized symbol…
Brion McClanahan
June 28, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 267

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 21-25, 2021 Topics: Cancel Culture, Southern Tradition, Southern Culture https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-267
Brion McClanahan
June 27, 2021
Blog

Requiem for a Hell Raiser

We all, as we go through life, encounter people that who deserve to be remembered. Everyone does, in a sense. But all these people, their good and bad characteristics, are more personal when you have a familial connection to them. My Grandfather, Lewis Charles ‘Mecky’ Freeman, was a man who surely deserves to be remembered, for weal or woe. Lewis…
Travis Holt
June 25, 2021
Blog

A Plague on the South

While the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has also wreaked havoc throughout the South, there was an even more deadly epidemic that attacked a number of Southern states almost a century and a half ago.  In the spring of 1878, thousands of refugees from Cuba fled to New Orleans at the end of an unsuccessful ten-year war to gain their  independence…
John Marquardt
June 24, 2021
Blog

The Latin South

“The Hispanic community understands the American Dream and have not forgotten what they were promised,” declared Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who fled their native land in 1956 during the regime of Fulgencio Batista. Though their stories are not often told, Hispanics have been realizing that American vision in the South since the antebellum era. Indeed,…
Casey Chalk
June 23, 2021
Blog

When Did We Have a Civil War, Virginia?

God’s guidance and blessing began in Virginia. But Civil War is where we are today.  For those who have had the usual blather from a contemporary public-school education, a little background. Well, actually, more than a little if your public school (and universities) are as useless as they are as this is written. Point to make: Critical Race Theory is…
Paul H. Yarbrough
June 22, 2021
Blog

The Righteous Cause Myth Strikes Again

As most Americans have learned by now, in their rush to do something politically correct, Congress passed, and the president signed, a bill making “Juneteenth” a federal holiday.  Some of us even got a sudden day off as a consequence.  Until a few years ago, hardly anyone had ever heard of “Juneteenth.”  Apparently, it was the day when word reached…
Samuel Ashwood
June 21, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 266

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 14-18, 2021 Topics: Cancel Culture, Western Civilization, Abraham Lincoln, Maryland https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/ep-266
Brion McClanahan
June 19, 2021
Blog

The Real VMI: A Little Meritocracy, 1839-2021?

On June 1, 2021, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) – historic, meritocratic, renowned for rigor and its graduates’ service, and, for decades as color-blind as any institution may reasonably expect to be in a fallen world – may well have ceased to exist in a sense when the results of a Richmond-mandated investigation of so-called “structural racism” were released; and…
Forrest L. Marion
June 16, 2021
Blog

Rebirthing Lincoln

A review of Rebirthing Lincoln, A Biography (Southern Books, 2021) by Howard Ray White I have always been skeptical of historical mysteries.  We know that there have been people who claimed to be the French Dauphin and the Russian Princess Anastatia, who somehow survived their reported demise.  At least six people claimed to be Jesse James, and there are those…
Clyde Wilson
June 15, 2021
Blog

A Southern Song, A Southern Heritage–Canceled

“When we talk about the War it is our history we are talking about, it is a part of our identity.  To tell libellous lies about our ancestors is a direct attack on who we are.” —from Lies My Teacher Told Me by Clyde N. Wilson “The Story of Maryland is sad to the last degree.” —Jefferson Davis In the…
J.L. Bennett
June 14, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 265

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 7-11, 2021 Topics: Secession, Southern Tradition, Abraham Lincoln, Wokism, Western Civilization https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-265
Brion McClanahan
June 12, 2021
Blog

Secession Was Not About Slavery

Original in the possession of the Minnesota Historical Society. First some context. The South did not secede to “preserve and extend slavery.” Its “pro-slavery“ arguments were not in response to any major political party in the antebellum period calling for emancipation. There was none! Southern secession was a result of 70 years of defending itself against Northern economic exploitation, Northern…
Rod O'Barr
June 11, 2021
Blog

The Lincoln Assassination Plot–An Alternate History

A review of The Retribution Conspiracy: The Rise of the Confederate Secret Service (Scuppernong Press, 2021) by Dr. Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. In a world full of ever arising new conspiracy theories, one over 150 years old still intrigues us. Did the South conspire to kill Lincoln? Noted scholar and historian, Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr’s, novel The Retribution Conspiracy adds…
James Ronald Kennedy
June 10, 2021
Blog

Western Civilization-Post Scriptum

I once wrote an article on the problems arising from what I termed “group condemnation.” I believed that in attempting to warn people of dangers lurking in the culture, those who blamed “groups” rather than individuals tended to lose credibility. To speak against the Jews or the blacks or any “group” rather than individuals within those groups often resulted in…
Valerie Protopapas
June 8, 2021
Blog

Fighting for 5 Miles

As Memorial Day approaches, I am thinking of a man I never met. His name is Charles Willis Kessler; he was a young, second Lieutenant from the small town of Eunice, Louisiana.  Two of his brothers went to war also, one older, one younger. Both came home. Willis did not. He lost his life a few days after the Normandy…
Averyell A. Kessler
June 7, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 264

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 31 - June 4, 2021 Topics: Secession, Slavery, Southern Music, Yankees https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-264
Brion McClanahan
June 5, 2021
Blog

A Cascadian Confederacy?

Nearly two weeks ago, five counties in Oregon voted to approve a measure to secede from the state and join its neighbor Idaho. The counties of Malheur, Sherman, Baker, Grant, and Lake joined Jefferson and Union county who had already voted in favor of similar measures last year. According to greateridaho.org, “the ballot measures are a part of an effort…
Cole Branham
June 4, 2021
Blog

Is Secession Treason?

And they, sweet soul, that most impute a crimeAre pronest to it, and impute themselves…Tennyson, from Idylls of the King (1) The US Supreme Court, in Texas vs. White, ruled that secession from the Union was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, in 1869, wrote the majority “opinion of the court.” His opinion was not that of Thomas Jefferson, the…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
June 3, 2021
Blog

On “Good Uses” for the Confederate Flag

One of my colleagues in the ministry of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod (LCMS) recently wrote that among "good uses" for the Confederate battle flag are "diaper, shop rag, kindling, stuffing for a pillow, burping cloth," and "toilet paper."  In the ensuing discussion - which I was not a part of - he added, "It's a treason/slavocracy flag.  Plain…
Rev. Larry Beane
June 2, 2021
Blog

Academy of Southern Music

My name is Tom Daniel, and I’m a happy guy.  I’m naturally optimistic, and I love talking about all the good things that come from the South.  I get discouraged when I see Southerners who keep falling into that same trap where they only want to talk about the years 1861-1865.  When there are 400 years of Southern culture to…
Tom Daniel
June 1, 2021
Blog

Slavery and Agency

Reviewers are unrelenting in their praise for the new Amazon streaming television series The Underground Railroad, a magic realist cinematographic depiction of the eponymous book by Colson Whitehead, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. A review in ABC News calls the show “a masterpiece that raises series TV to the level of art.” The Washington Post has featured…
Casey Chalk
May 31, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 263

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 24-28, 2021 Topics: Reconstruction, Social Justice, Neoconservatives https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-263
Brion McClanahan
May 29, 2021
Blog

Time

“How time changes everything.” This quote came from the lips of a fairly surprised man of around 80, my dear great-uncle Carl Ray, as we descended into the valley of his childhood.It  had been some four decades or better since he had been around the old home places where he grew into a man. The people who own it now…
Travis Holt
May 28, 2021
Blog

Faust and the Devil–Teachers, Histrionic Historians

Why bother with opening the schools, if all that you’ll have is the same uneducated blowhards filling the minds of children with the same monstrous mush that is conjured by these same blowhards who want to be paid for sitting on their butts in the first place? Teachers go on vacation while telling students to “zoom’’ in on their “home”…
Paul H. Yarbrough
May 27, 2021
Blog

Bad History Masquerading as an Appeal to Peace and Piety: A Response to Allen Guelzo’s “Why We Must Forget the Lost Cause”

It is a testimony to the prevalence of anti-Southern sentiment that The Gospel Coalition (TGC), one of the most prominent evangelical parachurch entities, has provided a platform for such sentiments by publishing an article entitled “Why We Must Forget the Lost Cause.” Written by the prominent Princeton University Professor Allen Guelzo, this piece was published in the “Bible and Theology”…
Tom Hervey
May 24, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 262

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 17-21, 2021 Topics: Cancel Culture, Political Correctness, Academic Establishment, Southern Literature, Southern Culture, Southern History https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-262
Brion McClanahan
May 22, 2021
Blog

Listening to Miss Eudora

For Christmas, I gave my granddaughter a compilation of Eudora Welty’s novels. She’s an avid reader and tore into the book as soon as she unwrapped it. The short stories, however, were not included. Yesterday, we drove to a large national bookstore chain ( aka quasi toy store and puzzle shop) to purchase one of Miss Welty’s finest Why I…
Averyell A. Kessler
May 21, 2021
Blog

Make History History Again

In the 1986 comedy film Back to School, Rodney Dangerfield’s character, Thornton Mellon, a wealthy, middle-aged father, decided to attend college with his young son. Never serious about the endeavor, and more interested in women and parties, Mellon uses his vast fortune to hire experts to do his academic work for him. For his astronomy project, he hires scientists from…
Ryan Walters
May 20, 2021
Blog

The Attack on Marco Bassani

Originally posted at LewRockwell.com You may remember a meme circulating widely after the U.S. presidential election last November with a picture of Kamala Harris and the following comment: “She will be an inspiration to young girls by showing that if you sleep with the right powerfully connected men then you too can play second fiddle to a man with dementia.…
Jo Ann Cavallo
May 19, 2021
Review Posts

A Primer on Secession

A review of  Secession, State & Liberty, (Transaction, 1998) edited with an introduction by David Gordon. If there is a single book you should read on the subject of secession, Secession, State & Liberty is the one. Best of all, this collection of essays is entirely free, here: https://mises.org/library/secession-state-and-liberty The key point of the book is the demonstration that secession…
Terry Hulsey
May 18, 2021
Blog

The Professor and the Proposition

As the “Exceptional Nation” totters and pratfalls further toward perdition, some on what is commonly, if not entirely accurately, known as the “Right” are calling for the various factions to unite beneath a single banner – a band of brothers, as it were – to battle shoulder-to-shoulder against the Bolshevik plague-beast. Several such tocsins have resounded from the San Bernardino…
Enoch Cade
May 17, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 261

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute May 10-14, 2021 Topics: Cancel Culture, Robert E. Lee, Southern Tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-261
Brion McClanahan
May 15, 2021
Blog

The Statues Should Stay Up

During the ongoing debate regarding the removal of the monuments honoring Confederate Generals, those in support of the statues often say in defense, “The statues are part of America’s history; we need to learn from history.” While this statement is of course true, I do not believe it is appropriate in this context, as “learning from history” is synonymous with…
Prioleau Alexander
May 14, 2021
Blog

Angers Away

Over half a century before the Imperial German Navy launched its new and deadly method of undersea warfare against the Allied navies and merchant shipping in World War One, the Confederate Army was making history’s first successful submarine attack on an enemy warship.  On the night of February 17, 1864, First Lieutenant George E. Dixon, a former steamboat engineer before…
John Marquardt
May 13, 2021
Blog

Robert E. Lee: The Educator

Continued from Part 3.  “And of all the officers or men whom I ever knew he came (save one other alone) the nearest in likeness to that classical ideal Chevalier Bayard…And if these, our modern, commercial, mechanical, utilitarian ages, ever did develop a few of these types of male chivalric virtues, which we attribute solely to those 'ages of faith,' Robert E. Lee was…
Earl Starbuck
May 12, 2021
Blog

Carry Me Back to Old Virginny

In the early 1870s, a young pre-law student at Howard College was inspired by classmate and future wife, Mamie Friend. James Alan Bland would listen to the homesick sentiments of Mamie and her home in tidewater Virginia. During a trip to meet Ms. Friend’s family the two sat down together with pen, paper, and a banjo. Bland composed his song…
James W. Whitehead V
May 11, 2021
Blog

Did Slavery End on June 19th?

After the end of the War Between the States, the Union army established the District of Texas under the command of Major General Gordon Granger. The Emancipation Proclamation had been enforced by the Union army in every other state of the Confederate States of America which it had occupied. Texas escaped Union occupation during the war and the Union army…
Timothy A. Duskin
May 10, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 260

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 3-7, 2021 Topics: Southern Politics, Cancel Culture, Southern Religion, Southern Heroes, Robert E. Lee https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-260
Brion McClanahan
May 8, 2021
Blog

Conservative as “Defender of Liberty”

In 1960, the great Southern political philosopher Richard Weaver penned an essay titled “Conservatism and Libertarianism: The Common Ground.” Most people considered Weaver to be a “conservative,” and he accepted the term, but he also thought American conservatives and libertarians had much in common and should work together for a common goal: liberty. The current internal warfare in both conservative…
Brion McClanahan
May 7, 2021
Blog

Wokeism is Like Kudzu

Wokeism is a bit like kudzu. It’s not indigenous to the South, but once it starts growing… brother you better believe it will be hard to contain. And soon enough, you’ll wonder what life was like before it infested everything. Kudzu is pervasive south of the James River, which runs through Richmond. Wokeism, alternatively, is less common in the southern…
Casey Chalk
May 6, 2021
Blog

Robert E. Lee: The Soldier

Continued from Part 2. “He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring…a Christian without hypocrisy…He was a Caesar, without his ambition; Frederick, without his tyranny; Napoleon, without his selfishness, and Washington, without his reward.” – Senator Benjamin Harvey Hill As a commander who won victory…
Earl Starbuck
May 5, 2021
Blog

Southern Orthodoxy

A review of Preachers with Power: Four Stalwarts of the South (Banner of Truth, 1992) by Douglas F. Kelly I first became aware of Douglas F. Kelly through some videos on YouTube in which he was interviewed about his recent book Creation and Change, a defense of the book of Genesis as authentic history. His erudition and his manner (that…
Karen Stokes
May 4, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 259

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, April 26-30. 2021 Topics: Political Correctness, Robert E. Lee, Southern Literature, Confederate Monuments, Memorial Day, Union Monuments https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-259
Brion McClanahan
May 1, 2021
Blog

Contemplation in an Evil Time

Written in the Year 2021 Hampton, our stalwart Wade,             As wily as Odysseus in warAs full of rage for truth in time of fraud             As any celebrated Greek,He saw his son fall at his feet,             Kissed him a hard farewellIn manner Hector or Odysseus             Would bring to tears,Turned back to battlefield             Which he controlledAs full of righteous angerAs Achilles ever…
James Everett Kibler
April 30, 2021
Blog

Twitter Historians Distort History, Again.

Marjorie Taylor Greene forced the political left into an apoplectic rage two weeks ago when they discovered she intended to form an “America First Caucus” based on “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” Clearly, this showed that Representative Greene intended to force “white supremacy” on the rest of the United States. After all, she openly displayed her racism by using the term “Anglo-Saxon.”…
Brion McClanahan
April 29, 2021
Blog

Robert E. Lee: The Father

Continued from Part I. “He was a superb specimen of manly grace and elegance…There was about him a stately dignity, calm poise, absolute self-possession, entire absence of self-consciousness, and gracious consideration for all about him that made a combination of character not to be surpassed…His devotion to his invalid wife, who for many years was a martyr to rheumatic gout,…
Earl Starbuck
April 28, 2021
Blog

Daybreak in Dixie

Daybreak in Dixie:  Poems of the Confederacy by Linda Lee. Privately published, 2019. For those of us who value the history of our Southern people, these are the worst of times.  Public discourse is pervaded by a Cultural Marxist hysteria that wants what we love to be dead, forever.  I rightly use the term Marxist because the campaign against us,…
Clyde Wilson
April 27, 2021
Blog

Reconstruction is America’s Longest War

On April 14, 2021, President Joseph R. Biden announced that, beginning May 1, the United States would begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. The project to extract the Yankee Empire from many other empires’ graveyard will finish, according to the American President, on September 11, 2021—twenty years to the day after a ragtag group of mujahedeen provided Washington with the excuse…
Jason Morgan
April 26, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 258

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, April 19-23, 2021 Topics: Robert E. Lee, Cancel Culture, Political Correctness, Agrarianism, Southern Tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-258
Brion McClanahan
April 24, 2021
Blog

The Knight of Melrose

Ah! My Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?For now I see the true old times are dead…        Tennyson, from Idylls of the King My grandfather loved Tennessee Walking Horses, a breed so named for their beautiful run-walk, a gait which they carry in place of the trot found in other breeds. It is…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
April 23, 2021
Blog

Robert E. Lee: The Believer

In the Year of Our Lord 2021, it is fashionable for American Christians to despise the antebellum South. Many Christian leaders, Evangelical and otherwise, have defended or even applauded the destruction of Confederate statues by mobs. In 2016, the Southern Baptist Convention repudiated the Confederate battle flag. In September of 2020, J.D. Greear, President of the SBC, said the denomination…
Earl Starbuck
April 22, 2021
Blog

Robert E. Lee: Educator and Conciliator

Robert E. Lee considered reconciliation and education to be his highest duties after the War. While many other Confederate leaders left the United States, Lee remained in Virginia and worked to heal the wounds of the War. He turned down political positions and refused to capitalize on his name, and instead accepted a position as President of Washington College to…
Philip Leigh
April 21, 2021
Blog

Abundant Acreage Available

Like many traditional-minded people of this era, I have become disenchanted with products of the modern movie industry which are mostly either filth, silliness, or formulaic pablum. To my fortunate surprise, I recently stumbled upon a gem of a movie from 2017 called Abundant Acreage Available. Written and directed by NC native Angus MacLachlan, the entire film takes place in…
Anne Wilson Smith
April 20, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 257

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, April 12-16, 2021 Topics: the War, Robert E. Lee, Southern Heroes, Southern Tradition, John C. Calhoun, Military Bases https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-257
Brion McClanahan
April 17, 2021
Blog

Remembering John C. Calhoun

The spring of 1850 is an ominous perpetrator. Notwithstanding the crisis our country faced during those trying years leading to the so-called compromise of 1850, March 31st marks the death of one of our most favorable and forbearing men in our history, John C. Calhoun. Calhoun had always been a man of great vigor and zeal, uncompromising in his approach…
Brad Pond
April 16, 2021
Blog

The Postwar Lee at Washington College

Robert E. Lee's tenure as President of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) should be regarded as one of the most important events in American educational history, and it was for decades. He saved the struggling school, recruited young men from around the South, and instituted the honor code, a set of principles still used by students at the…
Philip Leigh
April 15, 2021
Blog

Foxes in the Henhouse

During the past half century, there has been an ever-increasing tide of derogatory comments about the South in general and the Confederacy in particular.  In more recent years, what began merely as verbal sneers and written slurs have now evolved into far more sinister acts of actual violence being perpetrated on our memorials and monuments.  Even worse, there is now…
John Marquardt
April 14, 2021
Review Posts

Separate but Equal?

A Review of Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (W.W. Norton, 2019) by Steve Luxenberg In 21st-Century America, there are precious few mediums through which the issue of race can be addressed with even a modicum of rationality.  One of the few means still available is the thorough, well-researched work produced by…
Joshua Doggrell
April 13, 2021
Blog

The “First Shot” Revisited

We have been told that the first shot fired in the "Civil War” was fired by the Confederacy at Fort Sumter in response to the Lincoln government’s attempt to rearm and re-supply that federal installation. The Sumter matter is important as after all the debate over the causes of the War are exhausted, there is always that one charge made…
Valerie Protopapas
April 12, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 256

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute April 5-9, 2021 Topics: Robert E. Lee, Political Correctness, Woke, Slavery, Secession, the War https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-256
Brion McClanahan
April 10, 2021
Blog

The Yankees Take Up the White Man’s Burden

Take up the White Man’s burden –    Ye dare not stoop to less –Nor call too loud on Freedom    To cloak your weariness;By all ye cry or whisper,    By all ye leave or do,The silent, sullen peoples    Shall weigh your Gods and you…    -  Rudyard Kipling, from The White Man’s Burden (1) *** African slaves – purchased from African…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
April 9, 2021
Blog

Woke Capitalism Guns for the South

Major League Baseball on 2 April announced that both the All Star Game and the draft would no longer be held in Atlanta as retribution for Georgia’s recent election laws. "I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year's All-Star Game and MLB Draft,” explained MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred. The…
Casey Chalk
April 8, 2021
Blog

Only A House Divided Within Itself Will Stand

On the Ingraham Angle recently, guest, Craig Shirley offered an opinion that should cheer the people who have read (best seller) The South Was Right.  Even those who haven’t read it but understand that the 1776 “founding” drivel of the Eric Foner socialist-mindset historical revision, is just that: drivel. Shirley, who is the author of five books on Ronald Reagan…
Paul H. Yarbrough
April 7, 2021
Review Posts

Robert E. Lee and Me

A review of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (St. Martin's Press, 2021) by Ty Seidule A number of good historians have written reviews recently of Ty Seidule's book, Robert E. Lee and Me, including historian Phil Leigh who produced the video, Robert E. Lee and (Woke General) Please Like Me.…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
April 6, 2021
Blog

A Defense of Lee

Three years ago, Woke General Ty Seidule of West Point addressed the students and faculty at Washington and Lee University on the life and character of Robert E. Lee. He aimed to tarnish Lee's reputation and primacy at the institution and insisted that Lee's name and legacy be removed from the campus. Some responded that Seidule was "speaking truth to…
Abbeville Institute
April 5, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 255

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute March 29 - April 2, 2021 Topics: History, John C. Calhoun, Southern Music, Southern Culture, Southern Tradition, Woke Social Justice https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-255
Brion McClanahan
April 3, 2021
Blog

Searching for a Literary Market in Southern Cities

“Take but degree away, untune that string,And hark! what discord follows! Each thing meetsIn mere oppugnancy”—Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida One of William Gilmore Simms’ abiding concerns was the almost complete absence of a profession of literature in the South. Prior to the 1850’s the South had produced only two professional writers of any note—Simms, himself, of course, and Edgar Allan…
Jack Trotter
April 2, 2021
Blog

Dixie Ball

It’s strange to think that until 1962 — when the Houston’s Colt .45’s enjoyed their inaugural season as an expansion team — the only baseball teams in the South were on its northernmost borderlands: Baltimore, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Of course, like all professional sports, baseball is about money, and profits are easily made in densely-populated urban centers, of…
Casey Chalk
April 1, 2021
Blog

Gomer Pyle and the Music of Southern Poverty

Sometimes, you need to go halfway around the world in order to make a point, especially if the point to be made is not a simple one.  This is one of those times.  Also, it’s probably past time that I should explain the difference between a Yankee and a Northerner.  “Northerner” is a geographic term that refers to anyone not…
Tom Daniel
March 31, 2021
Blog

John C. Calhoun: American

No American is more vilified than John C. Calhoun. A recent biography has labeled him the American "heretic," and it has become fashionable to blame every political problem in American on this long deceased statesman. Is this true or fair? Calhoun was well respected during his lifetime and served in almost every important position in the United States government. He…
Brion McClanahan
March 30, 2021
Blog

Beginning with History

Any fool can write history, and many do.  Please do not assume that I mean by this statement to vaunt the “expert” and slight the amateur.  In writing history the amateur is sometimes gifted, and there is no more pestiferous fool than the smug, pretentious “expert” who thinks of his own mind as the repository of ultimate truth.  What a…
Clyde Wilson
March 29, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 254

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute March 22-26, 2021 Topics: Robert E. Lee, Ty Seidule, Southern Manners, Southern Tradition, Southern Politics, Decentralization https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-254
Brion McClanahan
March 27, 2021
Blog

Southern Reflections on Being Neighborly

A white house sits on the outskirts of a small town in upstate South Carolina. It is modest in both size and appearance, and rather old, and in front of it next to the highway is a large cross which appears to have taken some money and effort to erect. There is a sign which invites any passerby to stop…
Tom Hervey
March 26, 2021
Blog

Our Other Man in Charleston

Published in 2016, the book Our Man in Charleston tells the story of Robert Bunch (1820-1881), the British consul in Charleston, South Carolina, who is described in the subtitle as “Britain’s Secret Agent.”Bunch was not, for the most part, a secret agent, but he did somewhat covertly keep his government informed about conditions and developments in South Carolina. In correspondence…
Karen Stokes
March 25, 2021
Blog

Dixie, Quo Vadis?

Many today feel that true Southerners living in the eleven States of the former Confederacy are, in many ways, once again fighting for their very existence and face the dismal prospect of the South they once knew becoming, as in Margaret Mitchel’s classic novel, a dream that will all too soon be gone with the wind.  Virtually everything they now…
John Marquardt
March 24, 2021
Review Posts

Secession’s Magic Numbers, Part II

A serial review of books numbering the States after a dissolution of the Union. A review of Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (W.W. Norton, 1993) by George F. Kennan and The Nine Nations of North America (Houghton Mifflin, 1981) by Joel Garreau. Although his suggestion that the United States might be better off breaking into 12…
Terry Hulsey
March 23, 2021
Blog

Robert E. Lee and (Woke General) Please Like Me

Ty Seidule's mea culpa memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me, has generated the predictable supporters: mainstream media outlets, leftist dominated history departments, and neoconservative "intellectuals." This says more about Seidule than his book. He just wants to be loved. On the other hand, his book is a collection of half-truths and cherry picked propaganda designed to meet his "opinion" of…
Philip Leigh
March 22, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 253

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute March 15-19, 2021 Topics: John C. Calhoun, Woke Politics, Southern Tradition, War Crimes https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-253
Brion McClanahan
March 20, 2021
Blog

I Listen

I read this piece to the Jackson Writers Guild a year ago. Since then, we’ve not been able to meet. Here it is again. A southern writer can collect more stories from a back-porch conversation than from hours of creative writing instruction or a ten-day cruise through the Panama Canal. It’s especially true on Friday night when everybody kicks backs,…
Averyell A. Kessler
March 19, 2021
Blog

Honoring Calhoun

Editor's Note: This speech was delivered before the Senate on March 12, 1910, at the dedication of John C. Calhoun's statue in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol. Address of Mr. (Henry Cabot) Lodge, of Massachusetts, United States Senate, 1910 Mr. PRESIDENT: When the senior Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Tillman), whose illness we all deplore, did me the…
Henry Cabot Lodge
March 18, 2021
Review Posts

The Greatest of All Leathernecks

A review of The Greatest of All Leathernecks (LSU Press, 2019) by Joseph Simon. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in eastern North Carolina along the Atlantic shore or was blessed to wear the insignia of the United States Marines is well-aware of the name John A. Lejeune.  In this biography by Joseph Simon we are introduced to…
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
March 16, 2021
Blog

Crimes Against Humanity

It is time to consider the crimes committed against Southern prisoners of war by their federal captors. In 1903, Adj. Gen. F. C. Ainsworth estimated that more than 30,000 Union and 26,000 Confederates died in captivity (that is 12% died in the North and 15.5% in the South). However, the numbers and the death rate of Confederate prisoners were vastly…
Valerie Protopapas
March 15, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 252

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute March 8-12, 2021 Topics: Cancel Culture, Yankees, VMI, Civil Rights, Andrew Jackson https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-252
Brion McClanahan
March 13, 2021
Blog

The Termite Infestation of American History

As part of its campaign to pander to the important and urgent needs of African-Americans with extremely divisive yet ultimately performative identity politics, the Biden-Harris administration has announced that it will resume Barack Obama’s decision in 2015 to remove Andrew Jackson from the twenty-dollar bill and replace him with Harriet Tubman. Jonathan Waldman’s celebratory and condescending column in The Washington…
James Rutledge Roesch
March 12, 2021
Blog

Yankees 38, VMI 3

The Virginia Military Institute, ever the underdog. . . . For longtime VMI football fans, the above score may be all-too-painfully reminiscent. I recall the first time I heard of VMI. It was a University of Maryland vs. VMI football game in 1971. I was captivated by VMI from then on and began there as a “Rat” five years later.…
Forrest L. Marion
March 11, 2021
Blog

Now Is The Best Time To Be Southern

These past several years, we Americans have been living in an accelerating anti-cultural vortex. Day by day the Yankee juggernaut gains steam. Once content with carpetbombing Hanoi and Baghdad, the Yankees are now taking their civilizational demolition derby back South, where it all began. Topple the Southern statues, spraypaint the Southern monuments, mock the Southern accents and folkways, and cancel…
Jason Morgan
March 10, 2021
Blog

A Yankee Who Understood Southerners

“Dear me, what’s the good of being a Southerner?” asks one of the characters on the very first page of Henry James’ nineteenth-century novel The Bostonians. Though this question may not be the most important theme of James’ widely-hailed book, the idiosyncrasies and paradoxes of the South serve as a backdrop for the entire story. Indeed, James, a native New…
Casey Chalk
March 9, 2021
Blog

German POWs and Civil Rights

I have written here before about my beloved hometown of Tuskegee, Alabama.  Forgive me if you’ve read this before, but Tuskegee was unique among small rural Southern towns because of its large, well-educated, and fairly empowered Black population.  I wish I could find the reference source for this data, but years ago I read that the Black-to-White ratio in Tuskegee…
Tom Daniel
March 8, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 251

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, March 1-5, 2021 Topics: Cancel Culture, Political Correctness, Southern Tradition, Southern Literature https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-251
Brion McClanahan
March 6, 2021
Blog

A Look Into Our Future

Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which He hath made crooked? Ecclesiastes 7: 13 Scott Howard, in his book The Trans-gender Industrial Complex, says on pages 164-5: The so-called Enlightenment made man the center of the universe, a premise no less ridiculous than the not-long-discarded geocentric theory. When man is the center of the universe, he is God -…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
March 5, 2021
Blog

Power School Wisdom

During last week’s ice storm misery, I thought a lot about my southern upbringing and the good things I’ve received from my small, poor state with a jagged past and uncertain future. I received many of these gifts from loving parents, my scamp of a grandfather, and friends, but also from enthusiastic Sunday School folks, teachers, and pearls of Power…
Averyell A. Kessler
March 4, 2021
Blog

The Lord Gives

It was a late night in Boone County, Arkansas when me and my newly married wife attended a party not far from our home in Lead Hill. The ol' boy that invited us had built a fire and we were all sitting around, drinking and telling stories, feeding the fire and enjoying the camaraderie, when his granddaughter walked out with…
Travis Holt
March 3, 2021
Blog

Total War in Georgia

In June 1863, Fitzgerald Ross, a British military man who was collecting information about the war in America, paid a visit to Richmond, Virginia, the capital city of the Confederacy. There he met with some high officials of the government, one of whom was Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. Ross described their meeting his 1865 book A Visit to…
Karen Stokes
March 2, 2021
Blog

Racism and Reputation

Two terms that are tossed about with great liberality today are “racist” and “white supremacist.”  Like other words with specific definitions, such as “fascist” and “Nazi,” these labels are losing their specific social, economic, political, and legal meaning, and have essentially become nondescript slurs thrown at anyone a Progressive disagrees with.All of these words are routinely used against those who…
Rev. Larry Beane
March 1, 2021
Podcast

Podcast Episode 250

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Feb 22-26, 2021 Topics: George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Political Correctness, Southern History, Nullification https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-250
Brion McClanahan
February 27, 2021
Blog

Don’t Watch This Film

“The Burning of Atlanta,” 82 minutes. Produced and directed by Christopher Forbes.  2020. I have written a great deal on the Abbeville Institute site in the past  on the portrayal of the South in films. I have tried to keep up with the subject.  So, I took this from the shelf in fond anticipation. Few times in my life have I…
Clyde Wilson
February 26, 2021
Blog

The Big Monochrome Picture

The principal character in Joyce Maynard’s 1992 novel “To Die For” said that if you look too closely at a black and white photograph, all you see are a series of black dots on a white background and then added that one must step back in order to see the big picture.  That, of course, is the problem today with…
John Marquardt
February 25, 2021