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Southern History

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Recovering Southern History

Every historian has a viewpoint, shaped by his own background, values, and perception of the present. The relationship between background and viewpoint is not necessarily simple. As in the case of Supreme Court nominees, one cannot always predict in advance in what direction a historians background, modified by research and thought, will lead. At any rate, we properly measure a…
Clyde Wilson
January 18, 2017
Review Posts

Old Western Man: C.S. Lewis and the Old South

I write not as an expert to tell you of my thought but to explain a particular concept of Lewis's and my own application of it to the Old South. Almost everyone knows something about C.S. Lewis as a writer of extremely readable children's books (about the land of Narnia that can be entered through the back of an old…
Sheldon Vanauken
January 10, 2017
Blog

Dan Sickles and the First Presidential Cover-Up

In our time, we think we know a lot about presidential cover-ups. There was Nixon's Watergate, of course. Some of us remember Lyndon Johnson's problems with Bobby Baker. And President Kennedy had his secret girlfriends. All of these, however, are minor matters compared to the granddaddy of them all, the biggest presidential cover-up in American history, the murder of Barton…
William H. Hunter
January 9, 2017
Blog

Things as They Are

William S. Belko, Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (The University of Alabama Press, 2016). Sometimes a professional historian gets it right. William Belko has produced a quality tome that both expands and enhances our understanding of American history. While most academics write about the same subjects and regurgitate fashionable theories with “new”…
Brion McClanahan
January 6, 2017
Blog

A State of Mind

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia offered a resolution to the Second Continental Congress, then meeting in Philadelphia, which began with the epic demand, “ That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”   After a month of heated deliberation, the Congress finally adopted Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence which…
John Marquardt
January 5, 2017
Review Posts

J. Evetts Haley and the Mind of the South

American historians often write of a contrast between the South, a closed reactionary society, and the West, free and open and characteristically American. The dichotomy thus presented is a false one. The West is the South. That is, to the extent that the West is a theatre for heroic action, rather than just a place to start a new business,…
Guy Story Brown
January 3, 2017
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The Year in Review

Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina told a friend in 1980 that, "I'm bound to confess that President Carter has instilled some foreboding in prospect to the outcome of the election....As I interpret his campaign sermon, President Carter said states' rights had become as obscene as any four-letter word, and Ronald Reagan had proved his unfitness for the presidency by telling…
Brion McClanahan
December 30, 2016
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When the South Was America 1607-1861

Dr. Donald Livingston on "When the South Was America, 1607-1861" at the 2016 Abbeville Institute Summer School on "The Southern Tradition and the Renewal of America," June 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW4M46JXXzE
Donald Livingston
December 27, 2016
Blog

Stereotyping the South Up North

The 1861-65 war destroyed the American South’s economic, legal, political and social systems, and afterward ruled the region with proconsuls dispatched from Washington. From this aftermath of war came the invented view of the desolated South – a section known in antebellum times for providing the majority of presidents and exemplary political thinkers — as an uncouth and backward region…
Bernard Thuersam
December 22, 2016
Review Posts

The Conversation Club of Charleston

This essay was presented at the 2016 Abbeville Institute Summer School.   When I was young I used to read a lot of books about archaeology—the study of ancient lost worlds and civilizations. I never got to study archaeology, but I became an archivist, and I suppose my job is a little like field archaeology—except that I work indoors, in air-conditioned…
Karen Stokes
December 21, 2016
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I Am So Old I Can Remember When….

—there was no television; and then when there was one station on two hours a day. —newspapers were locally owned, had lots of locally written literate material, and even had intelligent independent commentary on the editorial page. —a male American seen carrying an umbrella would have been ridiculed and probably beat up. —most people had not been up in an…
Clyde Wilson
December 20, 2016
Blog

Richard Taylor

General Richard Taylor was only son of President Zachary Taylor. His father and mother were natives of Virginia, and his grand father, also a Virginian, commanded a brigade of Virginia troops in the battle of Brandywine. The hereditary residence of the family was in Orange county, Virginia. President Taylor's eldest daughter married Lieutenant Jefferson Davis, the late President of the…
Dabney H. Maury
December 16, 2016
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They Came From the East

 It is generally thought that when the earliest Homo sapiens arrived on the scene in Africa and Asia less than a hundred-thousand years ago, all of North and South America was devoid of human habitation.  Most in the scientific community also contend that it was no more than twenty to thirty-thousand years ago, as the glaciers from the last Ice Age…
John Marquardt
December 9, 2016
Review Posts

The Legacy of Francis Butler Simkins

A biographer defined Francis Butler Simkins as "one of the most interesting intellectual forces of his generation." As a scholar who questioned conventional thinking he "helped lay the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet, when these momentous events of the 1950s and 1960s challenged the traditional order in the American South, Simkins discovered much...that he believed should be conserved…
Grady McWhiney
November 8, 2016
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The Oregon Question

But I oppose war, not simply on the patriotic ground of a citizen looking to the freedom and prosperity of his own country, but on still broader grounds, as a friend of improvement, civilization and progress. Viewed in reference to them, at no period has it ever been so desirable to preserve the general peace which now blesses the world.…
John C. Calhoun
November 3, 2016
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The Other William C. Falkner

The date was Tuesday, November 5th . . . the year was 1889 . . . federal and local elections were being held in twenty states throughout America.  In addition to the elections in Virginia that day, the newly launched steamer “New York” was setting out on her trial run from Norfolk.  Further south, after winning a seat in the…
John Marquardt
November 1, 2016
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Washington’s Rye

Every student of history knows at least a brief sketch of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, but most people don't realize that Alexander Hamilton's excise tax on distilled spirits hit George Washington in the wallet as well, albeit years after the rebellion. He owned the largest distillery in Northern Virginia from 1797-1799 and shipped hundreds of gallons of moonshine to Alexandria during the…
Brion McClanahan
September 23, 2016
Review Posts

John C. Calhoun: Anti-Imperialist

The mission of the Abbeville Institute, to redeem what is worthwhile in the Southern tradition, is an embattled one. The dominant powers in American discourse today have succeeded in confining the South to a dark little corner of story labeled “Slavery and Treason.” This is already governing the public sphere of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Such an approach not only…
Clyde Wilson
September 22, 2016
Review Posts

James Jackson of Georgia: Unknown Patriot Founder

Published in honor of James Jackson's birthday, September 21. Delivered in Savannah, in February, 1806, by the Author of this work. IT is announced to us, that on the 19th day of the last month, departed this life, at the City of Washington, after a long and painful illness, Major General James Jackson, one of our Senators in the Congress…
Thomas U.P. Charlton
September 21, 2016
Review Posts

The Last of the Romans

This essay was originally published at The Imaginative Conservative and is published here in honor of Carroll's birthday, September 19. The last of the American signers of the Declaration of Independence to pass from this world, Charles Carroll of Carroll was also one of the most formally educated of the American founders. Living seventeen years in France and England, Carroll…
Bradley J. Birzer
September 19, 2016
Review Posts

Rethinking the War for the 21st Century

(13th Annual Gettysburg Banquet of the J.E.B. Stuart Camp, SCV, Philadelphia) ****How Should 21st Century Americans Think about the War for Southern Independence? **** We human beings are peculiar creatures, half angel and half animal, as someone has said. Alone among creatures we have a consciousness of ourselves, of our situation, and of our movement through time. We have language,…
Clyde Wilson
September 14, 2016
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Decentralization For Humanity’s Sake

The Roman historian Titus Livius once called Rome “the greatest nation in the world.”  He wrote those words in a time of moral and political decline, and Livy was hoping by outlining the greatness of the once proud republic, the Roman people would arrest the decline and embrace the principles that had made Rome great.  Livy argued that without understanding…
Brion McClanahan
September 9, 2016
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Call Me Simple with Strange Words for Strange Days

Call me simple... But I don’t understand: Why the government spends billions on welfare but people keep saying hunger is a big problem. Why the government spends billions on education and the population gets dumber and dumber. Why the government spends billions on “intelligence” and defense but could not prevent 9/11. Why pointless filthy language has taken over in popular…
Clyde Wilson
September 7, 2016
Review Posts

Choosing Southernness: Southern With an Italian Accent

Late in August 1965, a young boy not yet eight-years-old stood with his father on the field at Gettysburg near the spot where Pickett's men formed in the woods. The boy's father was not a learned man and had an uncertain grasp of the events that took place on that ground more than a century before. "Which side were we…
Mark G. Malvasi
September 6, 2016
Review Posts

The South as an Independent Nation

This article was originally published in Southern Partisan Magazine in 1997. "Being a Southerner is a spiritual condition, like being a Catholic or Jew." So wrote Richard Weaver in his essay "The South and the American Union" in The Lasting South (1957). The South's experience during the war for its independence, he added, only confirmed this separateness of spirit and…
William Cawthon
September 1, 2016
Review Posts

Reflections of a Ghost: An Agrarian View After Fifty Years

Of the twelve agrarians who wrote the symposium I'll Take My Stand, only three are alive: Robert Penn Warren, the poet and novelist, Lyle Lanier, a psychologist and former executive vice-president of the University of Illinois, and myself, a writer and reader of fiction. I don't presume to speak either for Warren or Lanier, and I don't know how to…
Andrew Nelson Lytle
August 23, 2016
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Confederate Memorial Hall and Jack Daniels

In 1935 the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) constructed Confederate Memorial Hall as a residence for girls at Nashville's Peabody College. Originally residents who were descendants of Confederate veterans and agreed to become teachers were granted free room and board. The school and dormitory were acquired by Vanderbilt University in 1979. Earlier this month university chancellor, Nicholas Zeppos, announced…
Philip Leigh
August 22, 2016
Review Posts

A Southern Political Economy vs. American State Capitalism

General Lee was a soldier and leader of men, not a politician. Although several of his decisions as soldier had an important political impact in American history, he seldom discussed such matters. An exception is his correspondence with the British historian Acton shortly after the war. Acton had spent a long career studying how constitutional liberty had gradually developed as…
Clyde Wilson
August 10, 2016
Blog

The Inside War

Editor's Note: This article was originally published at The Southern Literary Review and is an interview with author Robert J. Ernst by Allen Mendenhall covering Ernst's book, The Inside War. APM: Thanks for taking the time to sit down for this interview, Bob. Your novel The Inside War is about an Appalachian mountain family during the Civil War. How long…
Allen Mendenhall
August 5, 2016
Review Posts

American Culture: Massachusetts or Virginia

Delivered at the 2016 Abbeville Institute Summer School. A Frenchman has observed that the qualities of a culture may be identified by two characteristics--- its manners and its cuisine. If that is so, then we can safely say that the United States, except for the South, has no culture at all. Aside from the South the only American contributions to…
Clyde Wilson
August 3, 2016
Review Posts

The Free State of Jones: History or Hollywood?

Hollywood has struck again with another “Civil War” movie that, unsurprisingly as it may seem, does not do justice to the real Southland or the Confederacy.  The latest episode is an epic by director Gary Ross, “Free State of Jones,” starring Matthew McConaughey as the film’s hero, Newt Knight. “Free State of Jones” tells the story of a Knight-led rebellion…
Ryan Walters
July 12, 2016
Blog

The Louisiana “Hippeaux”

In America, there are a lot of places you can go that will make you feel like you’re in a foreign country.  Certain areas of Miami, Phoenix, or San Francisco immediately come to mind, and you might feel like you need a passport to go there.  However, I firmly believe that when I travel to some parts of Louisiana, I…
Tom Daniel
July 11, 2016
Review Posts

My Son, Get Wisdom, Get Understanding

Address delivered to the graduates of the South Carolina College, December 1821. Gentlemen, YOU are now about to quit the precincts of the College, and to enter upon the commerce of the world. Your education is supposed to be finished; in reality it is about to commence. The roads that lead to knowledge useful and ornamental, have been pointed out…
Thomas Cooper
June 17, 2016
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Who Will Be Our Monuments Men?

The 2014 movie “Monuments Men” exposed a little known aspect of the horrors of Hitler’s Aryan supremacist totalitarian regime – the looting of priceless historical treasures and cultural purge of peoples he viewed as inferior. In the years leading up to American involvement in WWII, art historians around the world were in an uproar, concerned about systematic theft and destruction…
Lunelle McCallister
June 10, 2016
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The South Carolina Doctrine

Sir, South Carolina has not gone one step further than Mr. Jefferson himself was disposed to go in relation to the present subject of our present complaints; not a step further than the statesmen from New England were disposed to go under similar circumstances; no further than the senator from Massachusetts himself once considered as within "the limits of a…
Robert Y. Hayne
June 7, 2016
Review Posts

Jefferson Davis: A Judicial Estimate

This piece is published in honor of Davis's birthday, June 3. With unaffected distrust of my ability to meet the demands of such a great hour as this, I rejoice to be again on the beautiful campus of my alma mater, and have the opportunity of bringing a message to the young men of my country. And as this commencement…
Charles Betts Galloway
June 3, 2016
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Betrayed by Yankees Perverting the Constitution

Originally published at Circa1865.com. The presidential messages of Jefferson Davis were filled with assertions of the South’s legal right to secede and form a more perfect union, and determine its own form of government to the letter of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Not losing sight of this, even in early 1865, one Confederate congressman stated that “This is a war…
Bernard Thuersam
May 20, 2016
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A Christian Defense of the South

It is said that the more things change, the more they stays the same. This has proven more than a mere cliche in the aftermath of the horrifying events in Charleston, SC last year. When racial animosity failed to materialize in the wake of the shootings at a predominantly African-American Church, Progressive political elements made the call to eliminate Southern…
Thomas Bryant
May 12, 2016
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“Don’t Leave Me Here to Bleed to Death!”

The most recent issue of Hallowed Ground, a publication of the Civil War Trust, features an 1863 photograph of several Confederate soldiers laid out in shallow graves—casualties of the fighting at Gettysburg. This picture is like many of the grim photographs of the war dead, but what makes it unusual is that one of the soldiers has been identified. Two…
Karen Stokes
May 11, 2016
Review Posts

Remember Us

Delivered May 6, 2016 in Columbia, SC. Archibald MacLeish was a 20th century poet, author and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote the following about the lost soldier: We were young. We have died. Remember us. We have done what we could but until It is finished it is not done. We have given our lives but until…
Herbert Chambers
May 10, 2016
Review Posts

Women of the Southern Confederacy

Editor's Note: A Mother's Day special dedicated to all Southern wives and mothers, this piece was originally published in 1877 in Bledsoe's The Southern Review. It is strange how we undervalue the historical interest of contemporaneous events, and how careless most persons are of preserving any record of the most stirring incidents that mark their own pathway through life. While…
Albert Taylor Bledsoe
May 8, 2016
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Secession of the Heart

A dear friend of mine, a Harp like myself but born and raised in the Deep North, repeated to me for the umpteenth time one of the most persistent of all Southern stereotypes, the duplicitous Southerner. This type is all smiles and sweetness, until the proper time comes to lower the boom. As my friend put it, “No, we are…
John Devanny
May 6, 2016
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Erasing Southern Culture and History, Step by Step

Throughout the entire South, our Confederate Southern heritage is under massive attack. This time, it's not just Yankee invaders who are doing this under a new Reconstruction; it's being reinforced as well by influential Southern liberals who hate the traditional South. There's a line that can't be crossed. Jesus gave us an injunction to love our enemies, but this doesn't…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh
May 5, 2016
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New From Southern Pens, Part 4

A new contribution to Southern literature from one or both of the Kennedy brothers, authors of the classic The South Was Right! and other good books, is always a cause for celebration. The latest, Uncle Seth Fought the Yankees by James Ronald Kennedy, does not disappoint. Uncle Seth, a Confederate veteran, in about 100 easy lessons, gently educates the young…
Clyde Wilson
April 20, 2016
Clyde Wilson Library

Calhoun’s Carolina

John C. Culhoon. Culhoon is the right pronunciation by the way. John C. Culhoon was an upcountryman. We upcountry people tend to suspect Charlestonians, like Dr. Fleming, of being somewhat haughty and dissipated. Calhoun studied law briefly in Charleston and found a bride here, and he stopped off when he couldn't avoid it on his way to and from Washington,…
Clyde Wilson
March 18, 2016
Review Posts

Charles Carroll of Carrollton: The Southern Irish Catholic Planter

A slightly different version of this essay is Chapter Eleven in Brion McClanahan, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers (Regnery, 2009).  This essay is offered as a Southern celebration of St. Patrick's Day. Charles Carroll of Carrollton has one of the more interesting stories of the Founding generation. He was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies…
Brion McClanahan
March 17, 2016
Review Posts

The Principle of Secession Historically Traced

This essay is taken from The South in the Building of the Nation Series, Vol. 4 The Political History. THE political theory on which the Southern states in 1860 and 1861 based their right to withdraw from the Union was not the sudden creation of any one man, or of any one group of men. Like other ideas that have…
George Petrie
February 11, 2016
Blog

“Dar’s nuttin’ lak de ol’-time ways”

Many people are familiar with the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project of the 1930s. While some historians reject them for what has been called gross inaccuracies due in large part to the many positive memories of the institution (the negative accounts are always used), they have become the standard source for firsthand information on the institution from the…
Brion McClanahan
February 5, 2016
Clyde Wilson Library

The Way We Are Now

I promised to keep you updated on our government’s radio ads. In the latest, the Department of Justice offers you its benevolent services for any problem you might be experiencing with school bullies. * * * * I may not be a good American. I have never watched a Super Bowl or an NBA championship, never been to Las Vegas,…
Clyde Wilson
February 3, 2016
Review Posts

European Influences in the South

This essay is a chapter from The South in the Building of the Nation series, History of the Social Life. The solidarity of public opinion in the South has been so often commented upon that it is difficult to realize the heterogeneous elements employed in making her population. The "solid South" is not only a political but in many respects…
Edwin Mims
February 2, 2016
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Old South Education before the War to Destroy Southern Civilization

In the Old South, only those children whose parents thought they needed education, attended school; many did not.  Of those who did not, many were taught at home to read or to read and write.  A higher percentage of Southerners than Northerners attended college, though students in Southern colleges were more interested in making and enjoying social contacts than in…
George Crockett
January 29, 2016
Clyde Wilson Library

It’s True What They Say About Dixie

Throughout most of American history region has been a better predictor of political position than party. That aspect of our reality has been neglected and suppressed in recent times as the rest of the country has conspired or acquiesced in transforming the South into a replica of Ohio. Yet the notorious squeak vote on the ObamaCare bill shows that the…
Clyde Wilson
January 27, 2016
Blog

Lee the Philosopher

This essay was originally published in The Georgia Review, Vol. II, No. 3 (Fall 1948), 297-303. As the Civil War assumes increasingly the role of an American Iliad, a tendency sets in for its heroes to take on Fixed characterizations. Epithets of praise and blame begin to recur, and a single virtue usurps the right to personify the individual. In…
Richard M. Weaver
January 22, 2016
Review Posts

Stonewall Jackson

  This essay is excerpted from the Preface to Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (1997) by James I. Robertson, Jr. Thomas Jonathan Jackson’s walnut bookcase at the Virginia Historical Society contains six shelves filled with the volumes he collected. Almost in the center of the case stand three works side by side. The one in I he…
James I. Robertson, Jr.
January 21, 2016
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Southern Stars of David

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?    The Merchant of Venice (Act 3, Scene…
John Marquardt
January 14, 2016
Blog

Black Slaveowners

  This essay is the introduction to Larry Koger's book, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860. Black slaveholding is a historical phenomenon which has not been fully explored by scholars. Graduate students of history are often sur­prised to learn that some free blacks owned slaves. Even historians are fre­quently skeptical until they discover the number of…
Larry Koger
January 7, 2016
Clyde Wilson Library

Black Confederates?

A review of Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, by Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995, 447 pages; and Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slavemasters in South Carolina, 1790-1860, by Larry Koger, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994, 286 pages. Black Confederates! Remember, you heard it here first. You will be hearing more if…
Clyde Wilson
January 6, 2016
Review Posts

Did Black People Own Slaves?

This article was originally printed at TheRoot.com on March 4, 2013. One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least…
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
January 5, 2016
Podcast

Podcast Episode 7

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, December 28, 2015-January 1, 2016. Topics: Southern literature, the year in review, John C. Calhoun, slavery, the Confederate Flag, Southern film, California. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-7
Brion McClanahan
January 3, 2016
Review Posts

Christmas in Richmond, 1864

This piece is taken from Varina Davis's recollections of life in the South, published in the New York World on December 13, 1896, and reprinted here. ...Rice, flour, molasses and tiny pieces of meat, most of them sent to the President's wife anonymously to be distributed to the poor, had all be weighed and issued, and the playtime of the…
Varina Davis
December 25, 2015
Review Posts

“We want not Gascons, but Southern gentlemen, honorable, high-toned men of strict integrity and straight hair.”

Gentlemen of the Historical Society of Mecklenburg (1876): Our president has appropriately introduced the series of historical lectures with the inquiry, why so few have attempted to preserve the record of the great events in the history of North Carolina, and to. embalm the memories of the illustrious actors therein. Perhaps, it may not be amiss in me to pursue…
Daniel Harvey Hill
December 15, 2015
Review Posts

The Same Old Stand?

This essay was published in Why the South Will Survive: Fifteen Southerners Look at Their Region a Half Century after I'll Take My Stand, edited by Clyde Wilson, 1981. When the Southern Agrarians took their stand, they did it stoutly, on two feet. Some emphasized the "Southern," others the "Agrarian," but fifty years ago it seemed that the two loyalties, to the South…
John Shelton Reed
December 1, 2015
Review Posts

Defending the Southern Tradition

History is a liberal art and one profits by studying the whole of it, including the lost causes. All of us arc under a mortal temptation to grant the accomplished fact more than we should. That the fall of Rome, the dissolution of medieval Catholicism, the overthrow of Napoleon, the destruction of the Old South were purposeful and just are…
Richard M. Weaver
November 26, 2015
Blog

The Birthday Surprise

Martha Jane Davis (Campbell) was born in Reed Creek, Henry County, Virginia in 1840. Her mother died when Little Mattie was two, and, her Turner grandparents (who lived nearby) took her to raise. A pretty child with auburn curls and gray eyes, she soon became the spoiled darling of her grandmother, who preferred being called "Grahma"(Grandmere) possibly because she had…
Joscelyn Dunlop
November 12, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Thomas Jefferson, Southern Man of Letters, Part II

Several generations after his lifetime Jefferson became best known, as he still is, of course, for these words "All men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Here is another important lesson in understanding history. The American Founders tend to be treated as…
Clyde Wilson
November 11, 2015
Blog

When I Was Little: A tale of life in Mississippi during the War

This story was originally published at Alabama Pioneers and comes from the book Alokoli : the Choctaw County. “Tell us about when you were little” was the oft repeated request of two lovely wee girls, my grandchildren and now comes the request that I put it down in writing. Viewed from their own childhood of peace and plenty mine seemed…
Clemmie Parker Wilcox
November 9, 2015
Review Posts

Virginia First

I. THE name First given to the territory occupied by the present United States was Virginia. It was bestowed upon the Country by Elizabeth, greatest of English queens. The United States of America are mere words of description. They are not a name. The rightful and historic name of this great Republic is "Virginia." We must get back to it,…
Lyon G. Tyler
November 6, 2015
Blog

Andrew Jackson: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

‘If only I can restore to our institutions their primitive simplicity and purity, can only succeed in banishing those extraneous corrupting influences which tend to fasten monopoly and aristocracy on the Constitution and to make the government an engine of oppression to the people instead of the agent of their will, I may then look back on the honors conferred…
James Rutledge Roesch
November 3, 2015
Review Posts

Thomas F. Bayard and the Defense of the South, 1866-1876

This article is reprinted from Edward Spencer, An Outline Public Life and Services Of Thomas F. Bayard, Senator of the United States from the State Of Delaware,  1869-1880. With Extractions from His Speeches and the Debates Of Congress (1880) and is published in honor of Bayard's birthday, October 29. The war was fought for the Union. Whatever may have been the hopes or desires of some of…
Edward Spencer
October 27, 2015
Blog

Calhoun and Yale

I can still recall one of my college economics professor's witticisms. When a student mentioned that the current year's test had the same questions as last year's, the professor replied: "Yes, but the answers have changed." My professor illustrated a valid point: theories of economic causation, like other theories, often change. A culture's political and social attitudes also change. But…
Gail Jarvis
October 26, 2015
Blog

The Queen City Humbled

In 1865, a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine described Charleston, South Carolina, contrasting her condition before the war, and after four years of siege, blockade and bombardment: Not many years ago, Charleston sat like a queen upon the waters, her broad and beautiful bay covered with the sails of every nation, and her great export, cotton, affording employment to…
Karen Stokes
October 23, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Chronicles of the South

Introduction to Chronicles of the South: In Justice to So Fine a Country “The South” is a Problem. A Big Problem. This has been true at least since the 1790s when Mr. Jefferson and his friends rallied to put the kibosh—only temporarily, alas—on New England's attempt to reinterpret the new Constitution and set up a central government powerful enough to…
Clyde Wilson
October 21, 2015
Review Posts

Slavery in the Confederate Constitution

...... Although I have never Sought popularity by any animated Speeches or Inflammatory publications against the Slavery of the Blacks, my opinion against it has always been known and my practice has been so conformable to my sentiment that I have always employed freemen both as Domisticks and Labourers, and never in my Life did I own a Slave. The…
Vito Mussomeli
October 20, 2015
Blog

The Last Southern Democrat

“Daddy was a veteran, a southern democrat, They oughta get a rich man to vote like that.” Bob McDill, “Song of the South” The presidential candidacy of Jim Webb marks, perhaps, the last gasp of that nearly extinct species of politician populus austrinalus, the southern democrat. Webb, a native Missourian, has an impressive record of public service: a marine officer…
John Devanny
October 19, 2015
Blog

The Cemetery Tour Revisited

Well, another year has come and gone that the Auburn Heritage Association did not invite me back to portray secessionist William F. Samford in their annual cemetery lantern tour. This year’s tour concluded last weekend, and it has been at least a decade since that fateful night when innocent young progressives were assaulted at dusk by my fire breathing interpretation…
Tom Daniel
October 16, 2015
Blog

Hiding from History

When I moved to Wilmington, North Carolina as a retiree over twenty years ago, I brought much of the Yankee historical baggage—as written by the victors—of the War Between the States, or Lincoln’s War as many Southerners know it. I’ve always been interested in history, so naturally I wanted to understand more about the Southern views of the war. I…
R.E. Smith, Jr.
October 15, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Prosperity

Declining prosperity is now a settled fact of American life. Prosperity is not measured by the day’s average of stock speculation, or the profits of bankers, or the munificence of government subsidies and salaries, or the consumption of luxury goods, or even by the Gross Domestic Product. It is amazing how in a few short decades American “educators,” “experts,” “journalists,”…
Clyde Wilson
October 14, 2015
Blog

Believe It Or Not…

Criss-crossing the South, from Virginia and Maryland to Texas, and from Missouri and Tennessee to South Carolina and Florida, there are thirteen museums dedicated to the myriad oddities of life . . . Robert Ripley’s “Odditoriums.” Almost a century ago, as a reporter for the New York Globe, Ripley created what would soon become the world-famous media feature, “Believe It…
John Marquardt
October 9, 2015
Blog

The War to Prevent Southern Independence and Other New Tomes

Thanks for the “Amateurs” “Amateur” has come to mean “inferior” to most people today. But the term originally meant someone who was as good as a professional but did not take money for performance. Fortunately, Dixie has always had and still does have many able “amateur” historians. This is a good thing since most of the paid “professional” historians these…
Clyde Wilson
September 30, 2015
Blog

Civil Rights at the Casa Mañana

At the Battle of San Jacinto in April of 1836, the badly outnumbered Texas forces under the command of General Sam Houston avenged the historic defeat at the Alamo in San Antonio the month before by soundly crushing General Santa Anna’s vastly superior Mexican Army.  After that battle, Santa Anna was forced to sign the Treaty of Velasco which granted…
John Marquardt
September 28, 2015
Blog

Discovering Jackson

  Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (2014) by S.C. Gwynne. A braver man God never made. – Richmond Dispatch, 3-28-1862 (page 226) Gwynne’s biography of Stonewall Jackson is simply one of the best biographies I have ever read. Many biographies plod along a “cradle-to-grave” timeline that starts out something like “our hero’s father started out as…
Terry Hulsey
September 25, 2015
Review Posts

Robert B. Rhett: Liberty Protected by Law

“The one great principle, which produced our secession from the United States – was constitutional liberty – liberty protected by law. For this, we have fought; for this, our people have died. To preserve and cherish this sacred principle, constituting as it did, the very soul of independence itself, was the clear dictate of all honest – all wise statesmanship.”–…
James Rutledge Roesch
September 22, 2015
Blog

From the Saddle

John Rutledge of South Carolina is one of the most important men of the founding generation, but he has been lost to mainstream history. He is politically incorrect (most in the founding generation are) and his positions on the nature of federal power do not comport with modern nationalist interpretations of government. At 25, Rutledge was sent by South Carolina…
Brion McClanahan
September 17, 2015
Blog

Life In The Old Land Yet

There is life in the old land of Dixie yet. There seems to be no end of talent and knowledge coming forth in our defense against the South-hating jihadists who seem to dominate the American scene these days.   Valiant and wise people continue the daunting task of educating our fellow citizens about the truth of American history. The end of…
Clyde Wilson
September 16, 2015
Blog

Randolph of Roanoke and the War Party, 1806-2015

Few who encounter John Randolph of Roanoke in the pages of American history ever forget that inimitable, irrepressible figure. Randolph, a son of one of the “First Families” of Virginia, was the passionate, principled champion of the rights of the States and Virginia’s way of life, and the sworn enemy of nationalism, imperialism, mercantilism, abolitionism, and various other “isms” howling…
James Rutledge Roesch
September 11, 2015
Blog

Judah P. Benjamin: Able Statesman, Forgotten Patriot

If you showed the average American pictures of famous figures from Confederate States of America, there is a good chance many would recognize Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Pressed further, some may even identify Alexander Stephens. All were influential men, and important to the establishment and development of the Confederacy. However, none of them assisted the Confederate cause in…
Dave Benner
September 4, 2015
Blog

ISIS Punks and USA Vandals

This article was originally published at the Fleming Foundation. When the Islamic State blows up the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, the UNESCO (the cultural arm of the United Nations) condemns the act as a war crime.  UNESCO’s director-general declared that in destroying ancient monuments, IS was “seeking to deprive the Syrian people of its knowledge, its identity and history.”…
Thomas Fleming
September 3, 2015
Review Posts

The War for Southern Independence: My Myth or Yours?

In the antebellum era, Matthew Carey, Philadelphia publisher and journalist, was the most zealous and articulate advocate of a protective tariff to raise the price of imported goods so high that American manufacturers would be guaranteed a closed internal market that would provide them with growth and profits. He believed fervently that this was necessary to build a strong country.  …
Clyde Wilson
September 1, 2015
Blog

Japan and the South

When William Faulkner visited Japan in 1955 to attend a literary symposium in Nagano, he noted certain parallels between the aftermath of the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 and that of Japan’s a century and a half later. In an address, “To the Youth of Japan,” Faulkner summed up these mutual experiences by saying; “My side, the South, lost that war,…
John Marquardt
August 27, 2015
Review Posts

John C. Calhoun and “State’s Rights”

  The following is an abridged version of a chapter which will appear in the forthcoming, From Founding Fathers to Fire-Eaters: The Constitutional Doctrine of States’ Rights in the Old South  “Union among ourselves is not only necessary for our safety, but for the preservation of the common liberties and institutions of the whole confederacy. We constitute the balance wheel…
James Rutledge Roesch
August 25, 2015
Blog

People Along the Way: Dan Smoot

Dan Smoot never considered himself to be a Southern conservative, though he was born and reared in Missouri and spent his early adult life in Texas.  He was one of the leading conservative voices in the 1960s and hosted a weekly television program titled "The Dan Smoot Report." There were once principled men who were willing to carry the conservative…
Brion McClanahan
August 20, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

A Sacrifice for His People: The Imprisonment of Jefferson Davis

In 1866 Margaret Junkin Preston of Lexington, Virginia, a sister-in-law of Stonewall Jackson, wrote a poem she called “Regulus.” Regulus was a Roman hero who was tortured by the Carthaginians but never yielded his honour or his patriotism. Her verse, which did not mention Jefferson Davis by name, was a reflection on the imprisonment of President Davis—a tribute to Davis’s…
Clyde Wilson
August 19, 2015
Blog

Digging For Southern Roots

With all due apologies to Samuel Clemens, I like to think of myself as a Connecticut Confederate. Therefore, I was delighted to find recently that, in addition to being a self-made devotee of the “Lost Cause” and an ardent admirer of the South in general, I also have at least two actual ancestors who served gallantly in the Confederate Army…
John Marquardt
August 17, 2015
Blog

Was the Civil War About Slavery?

A new video entitled “Was the Civil War About Slavery?” from Prager University is currently making the rounds on the Internet. A caption claims that the video “settles the debate once and for all,” superseding over a century’s worth of scholarship by historians who have argued this matter. But does it really? The video is filled with misconceptions and myths…
Dave Benner
August 14, 2015
Review Posts

A Clear-Eyed Look at the Old South

Now that a third Reconstruction is very much underway in the South, it is more needful than ever to know and understand her history and her ways of living. Thankfully, Mrs. Elizabeth Allston Pringle, a South Carolina plantation owner and rice planter (1845-1921), has left us a valuable guidebook for doing such things in her written account of her family’s…
Walt Garlington
August 11, 2015
Blog

The South: The Genesis of American Independence

Originally published at www.circa1865.com In 1887 North Carolina’s Lieutenant-General Daniel H. Hill spoke of the American Republic and the men who founded, led and sustained it until a revolutionary movement ended its life after some eighty years. Shorn of the conservative South after 1861, the Northern government descended into political corruption, the Gilded Age, incessant warfare and moral depravity. The…
Bernard Thuersam
August 10, 2015
Blog

Another Look at the Confederate Battle Flag

Recently Mr. Donald Fraser wrote a column in my hometown newspaper, the Northeast Georgian, titled “Battle Flag Promotes Hate, Not Heritage.” He opened his article expressing a twinge of fear that he would probably not make many friends. I am glad, however, he is willing to say what he believes even at the expense of offending others, a luxury often…
Samuel C. Smith
August 7, 2015
Blog

Why Yankees Won’t (And Can’t) Leave the South Alone

This essay was first published in Southern Partisan in the Winter, 1985. Southerners rarely while away their leisure hours by contemplating Yankees, for there is no point in thinking of unpleasant things if one is not obliged to do so. Yet the practice does have value; to some extent, at least, we are defined by those attributes which set us…
Forrest McDonald
August 6, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

A Jeffersonian Political Economy

Your other lecturers have pleasant and upbeat subjects to consider. I am stuck with economics, which is a notoriously dreary subject.   It is even more of a downer when we consider how far the U.S. is today from a Southern, Jeffersonian political economy which was once a powerful idea. Economics as practiced today is a utilitarian and materialistic study. It…
Clyde Wilson
July 29, 2015
Review Posts

Raphael Semmes and the Confederate Navy

On October 17, 1862 William E. Gladstone, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered a speech at New Castle concerning the widening conflict in America. He said: “We may have our opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army. They…
Mark Baxter
July 28, 2015
Blog

Think Again, Jeff

The “conservative” Boston Globe columnist, Jeff Jacoby, thinks that the Confederate flag is “anti-American,” “an ugly symbol of oppression,” “the most poisonous ideologies in our national history,” “racial bigotry and victimization,” “racial hatred,” and “the right of white Americans to buy and sell black Americans.” The flag is also “the banner of slaughter” that “represents armed rebellion against the United…
Jack Kerwick
July 22, 2015
Blog

Our Noble Banner

The Confederate battle flag is protean. It is a powerful symbol that has entered the world’s consciousness. “Protean,” going back to the classical Proteus, is defined as “readily taking on varied shapes, forms, or meanings.”   And as “having a varied nature or ability to assume different forms.”   The flag’s power   is very real, but engenders a different feeling according to…
Clyde Wilson
July 20, 2015
Blog

The “Hawaiian Prophet” from South Carolina

South Carolina is not known for great surfing, but a native son named Alexander Hume Ford (1868-1945) is credited with the revival, preservation, and promotion of that sport. The scion of an old South Carolina family, he was the son of Georgetown County planter Frederick W. Ford (1817-1872) and Mary Mazyck Hume. His mother died at the time of his…
Karen Stokes
July 16, 2015
Blog

Afterthoughts on the Lowering of the Confederate Battle Flag in Columbia

This article was orgininally printed in the Unz Review and is reprinted here with permission from the author. Yesterday afternoon I heard a black civic leader in Columbia, South Carolina being interviewed about the just completed removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the statehouse grounds. The lady from FOX who did the interview wanted to know about the satisfaction…
Paul Gottfried
July 15, 2015
Blog

Nothing is Sacred

Any sensible, reasonable person is deeply saddened by the atrocious and tragic murder of nine innocent, people while they attended a Bible study in Charleston, SC. Such tragedy is unthinkable, and I am joined by the overwhelming majority of people across the South in extending my most heartfelt condolences to the families of these folks, and to their community at…
Carl Jones
July 10, 2015
Blog

Whiskey

As a teenager, I always loved Sydney J. Harris’ syndicated newspaper column called “Things I Learned En Route to Looking Up Other Things.” I’m still fascinated with the concept of finding important information through the backdoor. The power of derailment on the internet is intoxicating, and I love getting side-tracked when I’m supposed to be being productive. I think most…
Tom Daniel
July 9, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

What This Country Needs

In one of Henry James’s less unreadable novels, The Bostonians, the hero is Basil Ransom, an impoverished ex-Confederate from Mississippi who is trying to make his way professionally in the urban North. The author wants us to see the tough, realistic, earthy Ransom as a healthy contrast to the decayed idealism of the wealthy, reformist, insular, enervated society of Boston.…
Clyde Wilson
July 8, 2015
Blog

The Southern Cradle: A Review of The Other Irish by Karen F. McCarthy

The sub-title of Karen F. McCarthy’s highly readable The Other Irish: The Scots-Irish Rascals Who Made America sums up the book’s tone and scope: “The Scots-Irish Rascals Who Made America.” This is a general introduction to the Scots-Irish contribution to the history and culture of the United States, with special attention to their role in shaping the South. As the…
Mike C. Tuggle
July 6, 2015
Blog

Texas Reject

“Texans! The troops of other states have their reputations to gain, but the sons of the defenders of the Alamo have theirs to maintain. I am assured that you will be faithful to the trust.” – Jefferson Davis, 1861 This ruling was a foregone conclusion. As soon as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg implicitly compared Confederates – the descendants of American…
James Rutledge Roesch
July 3, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

The Grand Old (Stupid) Party

The awful Obama is pushing terrible things on our country like socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. He must be defeated so the Republicans can get in and push socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Obama is conducting two endless and pointless wars in Asia. He…
Clyde Wilson
July 1, 2015
Review Posts

South Carolina’s “Long Train of Abuses”

Just as we have always been told that America was founded by Pilgrims in search of religious freedom, we have also been told that Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence was based on British philosopher John Locke’s theories of “natural rights” and “social contract”. Jefferson was influenced by Enlightenment ideas and ideals but the indictments against the king…
Becky Calcutt
June 30, 2015
Blog

Mississippi Beaming

(1991) Oxford, Mississippi – I lost count of just how many times the University of Mississippi band played “Dixie” last Saturday while the Rebels were upsetting Georgia 17-13. The number had to be in the double figures, however. There were 31,000 at the game. Everybody who wasn’t from Georgia had a Confederate flag. Before the game began, there had been…
Lewis Grizzard
June 29, 2015
Blog

The Flag Controversy: We Did It To Ourselves

Who looks at Lee must think of Washington; In pain must think, and hide the thought, So deep with grievous meaning it is fraught. Herman Melville, "Lee in the Capitol," April 1866. “Be of good cheer: the flag is coming down all over, and it’s coming down because Rand Paul is right: it is inescapably a symbol of bondage and…
John Devanny
June 26, 2015
Blog

New From Southern Pens 3

The Report from Dogwood Mudhole Franklin Sanders is a well-known Southern leader and spokesman.   In 1995 Sanders, his wife, children, and grandchildren moved lock, stock, and barrel to Wayne County, Tennessee, determined to return to the land and learn to be farmers. Their adventures in this epic agrarian quest are being recorded by Sanders in a trilogy. The first volume…
Clyde Wilson
June 25, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

America’s Red-Headed Stepchild

This piece was originally published on 3 July 2014 and is reprinted in light of current events. Are you puzzled and irritated by the viciousness and falsity of most of what is being published these days about the South and Southern history? The beginning of all wisdom on this subject is to know that in American public speech and so-called…
Clyde Wilson
June 24, 2015
Review Posts

Way Down in the (Southern State of) Missouri

“Way down in Missouri…Journey back to Dixieland in dreams again with me…” – Lyrics from the “Missouri Waltz” (The Official Missouri State Song) by James Royce Shannon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qtymMIAUKQ A cultural identity crisis can be an absolutely terrible thing that can often have ramifications that transcend the time in which it was spawned. Such a trend can lead to the cultural…
Travis Archie
June 23, 2015
Blog

The Literature Police and Gone With The Wind

Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind was enthusiastically received when it was published but it has run afoul of the socio/political trends of recent years. Consequently, society's censors want the book banned. Throughout history there have been political and sanctimonious types who tried to restrict what the populace is permitted to read, but in our generation these types seem to…
Gail Jarvis
June 22, 2015
Blog

A Lady Champion of Free Trade

In her famous diary, Mary Chesnut called Mrs. Louisa S. McCord “the very cleverest woman” she knew. Of these two women from South Carolina, Chesnut is the most famous and widely read today, but Mrs. McCord—far more than clever—was a force to be reckoned with in her own time. In the antebellum era, she was the author of a number…
Karen Stokes
June 19, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Goodbye to Gold and Glory

“The Father of Waters now flows unvexed to the sea,” Lincoln famously announced in July 1863. He was, according to a reporter, uncharacteristically “wearing a smile of supreme satisfaction” as he related the news of the surrender of Vicksburg. Like many popular sayings about the war of 1861–1865, Lincoln’s words rest on certain unexamined assumptions. Why had the flow of…
Clyde Wilson
June 16, 2015
Blog

“Hang the Usurpers”

On November 21, 1793, the Georgia House of Representatives passed a bill titled “An Act declaratory of certain parts of the retained sovereignty of the State of Georgia.” It’s unclear as to whether or not the Georgia Senate concurred. The bill was in response to the Chisholm v. Georgia , the case resulting in the ratification of the 11th Amendment.…
Marshall DeRosa
June 15, 2015
Review Posts

The Old and the New South

Delivered as the commencement address for South Carolina College, 1887. What theme is most fitting for me present to the young men of the South, at this celebration of the South Carolina Col­lege ? What shall one, whose course is nearly run, say to those whose career is hardly begun ? In my retrospect I deeply sym­pathize with you in…
John Randolph Tucker
June 11, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Confederate Connections

A friend of mine, a scholar of international reputation and a Tar Heel by birth, was visiting professor at a very prestigious Northern university a few years ago. In idle conversation with some colleagues, he happened to mention that his mother was an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. His…
Clyde Wilson
June 4, 2015
Review Posts

The Truth About Jefferson Davis

This piece originally appeared in Southern Partisan magazine in 1983. Rosemont Plantation, the childhood home of Jefferson Davis, is nes­tled in the gently rolling hills of southwest Mississippi. Carefully restored, the Davis family home is shaded by moss-hung oaks and catalpa trees, surrounded by lush vegetation and warmed by newly-greened memories of the past. It is the last place on…
Robert McHugh
June 3, 2015
Review Posts

Randolph of Roanoke

This piece was originally printed in Southern Partisan magazine in 1986. Some miles beyond Charlotte Court House, in Southside Virginia, one may find his way to Roanoke Plantation, which seems almost as re­mote as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century. From the Revolution until 1810, scarcely a white man set foot on that planta­tion.- black overseers and…
Russell Kirk
June 2, 2015
Blog

The Plundering Generation

This piece was originally published in Southern Partisan magazine in 1987-88. A few years ago I was shuffling through accumulated litter in my garage attic when I came across some clippings dating from the 1960s. Among them were several letters to Life magazine comment­ing on an article by Bruce Carton. One reads as follows: Bruce Carton's article is interesting and…
Ludwell H. Johnson
May 29, 2015
Review Posts

Ludwell Johnson: Master Southern Historian

  Life and Work Why Read Ludwell Johnson? Both Ludwell Johnson’s style of work and choice of subject matter strongly recommend him to our consideration. As a working historian he is calm and measured, with just the degree of detachment that historical work ideally requires. As he puts it, “trying to identify cause and effect is, to me, the very…
Joseph R. Stromberg
May 26, 2015
Blog

“Scientist of the Seas”

Few Americans know of the great American scientist Matthew Fontaine Maury, and those that do probably do not know of his steadfast devotion to the Confederate States during the War for Southern Independence or his firm commitment to the South and her people. Maury was a native Virginian and his father had once been a teacher to Thomas Jefferson. Maury…
Brion McClanahan
May 22, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Antebellum Southerners in Europe

I want to look at Southerners going back to Europe long after the roots were planted, especially in the period before the second War of Independence began in 1861. The reason for looking at this is what it tells us about Southerners. One of the things it tells us is that we Southerners were a people. Our relationship to Europe…
Clyde Wilson
May 20, 2015
Review Posts

The Sesquicentennial of the War for Southern Independence as Symbolic of the Fallen State of the South

With the Sesquicentennial of the epic war of American history winding down, many may think this War no longer particularly relevant and we can move on to more current concerns. Such an attitude, which I dare say prevails among most Americans, Southerners included, ignores the watershed importance of the War known by any number of names, the “Civil War,” the…
William Cawthon
May 19, 2015
Blog

No History, No Culture, No Past

  The title of this article is how the radical Muslim organization, ISIS, characterizes its callous destruction of Jewish, Christian, and other pre-Islamic religious statuary; places of worship, libraries, and other ancient cultural artifacts. There are even videos of ISIS slaughtering groups of civilians. As justification for these massacres and devastation, ISIS claims that its concept of the Muslim faith…
Gail Jarvis
May 14, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

The South and the West, Part 2

It seems my mission here is to bring to your attention unfamiliar and unfashionable truths about American history. Let me give you another one. The American West, the frontier, was NOT conquered and settled by a “Nation of Immigrants.” George Washington was already the fifth generation of his family in Virginia, as were most of his neighbours. There was a…
Clyde Wilson
May 13, 2015
Blog

New From Southern Pens, Part 2

Maryland Redeemed Everybody knows that our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was written by Francis Scott Key as he watched the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812. Almost nobody knows the rest of the story. In 1861, Key’s grandson, Francis Key Howard, was locked up in Fort McHenry.   Howard wrote: “The flag which…
Clyde Wilson
May 8, 2015
Blog

Reconstruction’s Hungry Locusts

The wife of the president H.L. Mencken referred to as “Roosevelt the Second” provided much of the impetus for the communizing of the Democratic party in the mid-1930s, and could be readily found supporting and speaking before openly Marxist groups like the American Youth Congress, Communist National Student League, Young Communist League, and anti-Franco communists. In a news column she…
Bernard Thuersam
May 7, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

The South and the West, Part 1

When our ever-wise leader set up a program on the American West, he obviously had in mind the geographic west of North America—the Great Plains, mountains, and Pacific coast beyond the Colorado, Red, Arkansas, and Missouri rivers. But when Americans emerged onto the Great Plains in the second third of the 19th century, they were already the inheritors of two…
Clyde Wilson
May 6, 2015
Review Posts

James Henley Thornwell and Southern Religion

The God-fearing, Bible-reading, hymn-singing Confederate army grew out of a Southern soil well cultivated during the long struggle of countless, if largely unsung, preachers to civilize a harsh and violent frontier. Personal piety and Bible-centered family circles bolstered the churches in a successful effort to shape the regional culture. The churches assumed responsibility for the education, especially moral, of the…
Eugene Genovese
May 5, 2015
Blog

Post Appomattox Fallacies Justifying Federal Tyranny

“We the people” of Dixie are in a unique position in today’s America. We are, though most Southerners do not realize it, a conquered and occupied people. A people of a once free nation—the Confederate States of America composed of former sovereign states. Southerners are a minority in a nation ruled by the secular humanist majority of the North.  This…
James Ronald Kennedy
April 23, 2015
Blog

Tommy, We Hardly Knew Ye

Mr. Jefferson is quite passé these days, but ‘twas not always so. When I was a young lad, Mr. Jefferson was still firmly fixed among the America’s heroes, the great defender of the liberty of the states and the individual citizen, now not so much. Jefferson lost his luster among the members of the political Left over slavery, but perhaps…
John Devanny
April 16, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Thomas Jefferson, Conservative

In 1809 Thomas Jefferson yielded up the Presidency and crossed into Virginia. In the 17 active years remaining to him he never left it. The first volume of Malone's masterpiece, published in 1948, was Jefferson the Virginian. The sixth and last is The Sage of Monticello. Jefferson begins and ends with Virginia. Keep this fact in mind. It will save…
Clyde Wilson
April 15, 2015
Review Posts

Was Jefferson a “Scientific Racist”?

Originally published by the History News Network, 11 November 2014. “In one of my seminar discussions,” writes UVA professor Peter Onuf (now emeritus) in The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, “one young woman described suddenly feeling the she ‘did not belong here,’ that Jefferson was telling her that there was no place for her in his ‘academical village.’ ” He continues,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 14, 2015
Blog

The Antidote for Yankee Self-Righteous Delusional Disorder

The closing days of the sesquicentennial has offered media outlets the chance to reflect on the outcome of the War. The results were to be expected. Both “conservative” and “liberal” websites have lamented that the end of the War did not produce the sweeping political and social revolution that could have been, or in their minds should have been. Three…
Brion McClanahan
April 10, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

What to Say About Dixie?

What to say in brief compass about the South?—a subject that is worthy of the complete works of a Homer, a Shakespeare, or a Faulkner. The South is a geographical/historical/cultural reality that has provided a crucial source of identity for millions of people for three centuries. Long before there was an entity known as "the United States of America." there…
Clyde Wilson
April 8, 2015
Blog

Disunion in America and the Southern Confederacy

The late Richard M. Weaver, “now widely recognized as one of the most original and perceptive interpreters of Southern culture and letters, one of the century’s leading rhetorical theorists, and a founder of American conservatism,” crafted many essays still relevant today. He wrote prolifically until his death in 1963. The quote above came from the introduction of a large volume…
R.E. Smith, Jr.
April 8, 2015
Review Posts

What Makes Southern Manners Peculiar?

Southerners live in the 18th century. This common charge is not altogether false, since the peculiar habits, customs, and meanings of words found often in the American South are found also in 18th century English authors. Such a word is manners. Most English-speaking people and some Southerners use the word now in the only senses current during the past two…
Ward S. Allen
April 7, 2015
Blog

John Tyler Son of Virginia

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

A Southern Tradition: Restraining Bad Government

In talking about the Southern political tradition, it is most appropriate to point to the North Carolina Regulators and the Battle of Alamance Creek. This event was, in fact, only one of many such episodes in the colonial South--in the first 169 years of our history as Southerners before the first War of Independence. There was Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia…
Clyde Wilson
April 1, 2015
Review Posts

True American Whiggery: John Tyler and Abel P. Upshur

This piece is taken from Brion McClanahan and Clyde Wilson Forgotten Conservatives in American History. Two dates changed the course of American political history. On 13 September 1841, the Whigs expelled President John Tyler from their Party, outraged over his “betrayal” of what they considered true Whig political and economic principles. Shorty over two years later, on 28 February 1844,…
Brion McClanahan
March 31, 2015
Blog

“His Accidency:” The Indispensable John Tyler

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

Lest We Forget Southern History

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

Hanging with the Snarks: An Academic Memoir

There seemed to be little interest among audience members in whether the ideas I had presented were true, only whether their application would bring about results they liked. I used to have a running argument with a colleague, a great scholar now gathered to his fathers, during late afternoon seminars catered by the good folks at Jack Daniels. The argument…
Clyde Wilson
March 25, 2015
Blog

They Lived in the Age of Calhoun

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

Calhoun on American Government, Politics, and War

"When it comes to be once understood that politics is a game; that those who are engaged in it but act a part; that they make this or that profession, not from honest conviction or intent to fulfill it, but as the means of deluding the people, and through that delusion to acquire power, when such professions are to be…
Clyde Wilson
March 19, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

“A Senator of Rome when Rome Survived.”

This selection was originally printed in Brion McClanahan and Clyde Wilson, Forgotten Conservatives in American History (Pelican, 2012). Of the Great Triumvirate who dominated American public discourse from the War of 1812 till the mid-19th century, John C. Calhoun was the first to depart the scene, in 1850. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster lived a few more years. In a…
Clyde Wilson
March 18, 2015
Blog

“The Last Roman”: John Caldwell Calhoun

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

John C. Calhoun Vindicated

This essay was first printed in the Southern Partisan Magazine, Volume III, Number 1 (1983). INTRODUCTION One hundred and forty years ago, Senator Henry Clay proposed a constitutional amendment to limit the veto power of the president of the United States. Senator John C. Calhoun replied to Clay; and that speech in reply is the most succinct version of Calhoun's…
Russell Kirk
March 17, 2015
Blog

John Mitchel: Irish Confederate

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

John C. Calhoun: A Statesman for the 21st Century

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

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

White Cargo

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

Scratching Fleas: American Historians and Their History

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

Taking Back Thomas Jefferson

“There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.” – Thomas Jefferson, 1826, days before death It is now accepted as a fact that one of the preeminent Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson – the Apostle of Liberty and Reason – engaged in an illicit sexual relationship with one of his slaves, Sally…
James Rutledge Roesch
March 10, 2015
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The Professor, the Prankster, and the President

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

The Treasury of Counterfeit Virtue

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

Southern Core Values

In American higher education of the past forty years, I have observed two American histories, and two American literatures – which teach different American ideals and values, resulting in different societies and different vision of what it means to be an American. Today we have a Northern history and a Southern history; we have a Northern literature and a Southern…
David Aiken
March 3, 2015
Blog

“History is Nothing but a Pack of Lies We Play Upon the Dead.”

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

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

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

Sidney Lanier

BECAUSE I believe that Sidney Lanier was much more than a clever artisan in rhyme and metre; because he will, I think, take his final rank with the first princes of American song, I am glad to provide this slight memorial. There is sufficient material in his letters for an extremely interesting biography, which could be properly prepared only by…
William Hayes Ward
February 3, 2015
Blog

The Bonnie Blue

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

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

Vindicating the South

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

The Cause of Jackson and Lee

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

Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson

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

Confederate Flag Day

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

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

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

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

John Taylor and Construction

States’ rights may have been the defining force in Antebellum America, but modern, mainstream historians would have you believe that they were nothing more than a wicked creed cooked up by a few corrupt slaveowners. A review of a recent biography of John Taylor of Caroline referred to his “opprobrium” as the “premier states’ rights philosopher.” It would have been…
James Rutledge Roesch
December 19, 2014
Blog

The Lady Who Saved Mount Vernon

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

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part X

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

Please “Dump Dixie”

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

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

A Critique of Onufian Revisionism and Jefferson’s “Contradictions” Robert Booth Fowler writes: “The monuments to Stalin that have come down in recent years in Eastern Europe mark the fall of a former hero and the fall of the values the hero supposedly embodied. The situation with Jefferson, however, is different. The values celebrated by the Jefferson Memorial have not lost…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 9, 2014
Blog

Along the Corduroy Road

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

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

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

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

Twenty Million Gone: The Southern Diaspora, 1900—1970

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

The Political Economy of John Taylor of Caroline

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

Southern Preservation

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

Secession: Remedy for Federal Empires Endless No-Win Wars

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

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part IV

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

We Need No Declaration of Independence

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

Please Tread On Me

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

The Runnin’ Black Bears? No.

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

James Jackson: Forgotten Founding Father

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

Sayings By or For Southerners

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

A People Without A Heritage

For centuries the Scottish Highlanders, existing under a clan system, were apt to “revolt” against English rule. “Revolt” is the term the British used. In actuality, what the Scots were doing was “resisting” British rule, but when a government is determined to inflict control and subjugate a people, as the British were, any “resistance” to that is seen by the…
Carl Jones
August 20, 2014
Review Posts

David Crockett

This essay is taken in part from the chapter "Frontiersman" in Brion McClanahan's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Real American Heroes (Politically Incorrect Guides) and is presented here in honor of Crockett's birthday, August 17. The modern actor Billy Bob Thornton once said David Crockett in the film The Alamo was his favorite role. John Wayne played him, too. Every…
Brion McClanahan
August 19, 2014
Blog

Fire-Cured Dark Leaf

Cotton and tobacco. For years those two agricultural products were as synonymous with the South as sweet tea and grits. Cotton still is, but tobacco has fallen out of favor, though Southerners still love it and use tobacco products in greater numbers per capita than any other people in America. Tobacco, not cotton, was king in Virginia throughout much of…
Brion McClanahan
August 15, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

What is a Southerner?

Expert testimony in several federal court cases: Scholars in every field in the humanities and social sciences have long recognized that Southerners have formed a distinct people within the body of Americans from the earliest colonial times to the present. Authorities in history, political science, economics, sociology, folklore, literature, geography, speech, and music, have recognized and studied the significance of…
Clyde Wilson
August 13, 2014
Review Posts

Why Do They Hate the South and Its Symbols?

This article is taken from The Unz Review and was originally presented at the Confederate Flag Day in Raleigh, NC in 2007. Those Southern secessionists whose national flag we are now celebrating have become identified not only with a lost cause but with a now publicly condemned one. Confederate flags have been removed from government and educational buildings throughout the…
Paul Gottfried
August 4, 2014
Review Posts

Understanding “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

In the mid-1800’s women were not to be leaders in politics and religion, but Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe did just that. Of Harriet, daughter of Lyman Beecher and sister of Henry Ward Beecher, both influential Abolitionists/ministers/educators, Sinclair Lewis would write: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first evidence to America that no hurricane can be so disastrous to…
Howard Ray White
July 18, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Those People Part 2

The flag which he had then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over the victims of as vulgar and brutal despotism as modern times have witnessed. —Francis Key Howard, a prisoner of Lincoln at Fort McHenry, 1861 Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery. —Governor Joel Parker…
Clyde Wilson
July 15, 2014
Blog

Rethinking the Declaration of Independence

The article originally was published by Townhall.com on July 4, 2010. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1825 that he intended the Declaration of Independence to be “an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.” Yet, he did not propose the Declaration should “find out new principles, or…
Brion McClanahan
July 4, 2014
Blog

Rose of Dixie

Few American authors wrote as many stories set in the old South as William Sydney Porter, who used the pen name, “O.Henry.” There are differing versions of how and why Porter chose the nom de plume O. Henry, each with varying degrees of credibility. Suffice it to say that he is considered one of America's great writers of fiction, and…
Gail Jarvis
July 1, 2014
Blog

Party Down South

The trailer (end of the piece) for the second season of Country Music Television’s “Party Down South” (a rehash of MTV’s “Real World,” but with stand-in hicks instead of angsty, edgy musicians and models) represents what most Americans – and many woefully misled Southerners – believe about Southern culture. The term “country” is repulsive to me. As the great rock…
James Rutledge Roesch
July 1, 2014
Blog

Rebel Yell

Notwithstanding Ole Miss fans, those opening few bars of “Dixie” sends chills down the back of every good Southerner everywhere. By the time the notes hit the phrase “land of cotton,” it makes you want to throw back your head and rip out a good rebel yell. It feels good to do it. It feels right to do it. There’s…
Tom Daniel
June 30, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

John C. Calhoun and Slavery as a “Positive Good:” What Calhoun Did Not Say

In what became the United States, servitude of people of the black African race existed for about two and a half centuries. The subject of American slavery is today so entertwined with unhealthy and present-centered emotions and motives—guilt, shame, hypocricy, projection, prurient imagination, propaganda, vengeance, extortion—as to defy rational historical discussion. Curiously, the much longer flourishing of African bondage—in the…
Clyde Wilson
June 25, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Southern Culture: From Jamestown to Walker Percy

"Nations are the wealth of mankind, its generalized personalities; the least among them has its own unique coloration and harbors within itself a unique facet of God's design." —Alesandr Solzhenitsyn James Warley Miles was librarian of the College of Charleston in the mid-nineteenth century. He was also an ordained Episcopal priest. Miles had spent some years in the Near and…
Clyde Wilson
June 18, 2014
Review Posts

Senator Sam

This essay is from Brion McClanahan and Clyde Wilson's Forgotten Conservatives in American History (Pelican, 2012). In 1973, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina was perhaps the most respected and popular member of the United States Congress. His role in the televised Watergate hearings as chairman of the Senate Select Committee led one member of Congress to remark that he…
Brion McClanahan
June 16, 2014
Blog

Clyde N. Wilson

Most people don't know, but today (June 11) is Clyde Wilson's birthday. I had the honor of being Clyde's last doctoral student. I first met Clyde in the Spring of 1997 as a senior in college trying to decide where to attend graduate school. My top choices were South Carolina and Alabama, Clyde Wilson or Forrest McDonald. My advisor as…
Brion McClanahan
June 11, 2014
Blog

King Numbers

June 2 was John Randolph of Roanoke's (1773-1833) birthday. We at the Abbeville Institute missed it during our week dedicated to Jefferson Davis, but the two could have been celebrated in tandem. Davis's cause in 1861 was no less than what Randolph consistently championed during his long career in the United States Congress. The "American Burke" as he has been…
Brion McClanahan
June 10, 2014
Blog

De Tocqueville and the South

I’ve been perplexed about Tocqueville’s posture towards the South for quite some time. On the surface, he seems to have a rather dismal view of the South. However, a more penetrating reading of Democracy In America* opens up new possibilities. Consider the following: First, according to Tocqueville, the “seed of complete democracy” has its origin in New England. But there…
Marshall DeRosa
June 6, 2014
Blog

The Other Side of Slavery

The concept of a faithful slave goes against today's authorized slave narratives. Before the social upheavals of the 1960s, it was still permissible to depict different reactions of slaves towards their masters; all slaves didn't have to be portrayed as resentful. Admittedly, most slaves wanted freedom and many slaves were mistreated and consequently bitter towards their masters. Indeed there were…
Gail Jarvis
May 26, 2014
Blog

The Other Side of Slavery

The concept of a faithful slave goes against today's authorized slave narratives. Before the social upheavals of the 1960s, it was still permissible to depict different reactions of slaves towards their masters; all slaves didn't have to be portrayed as resentful. Admittedly, most slaves wanted freedom and many slaves were mistreated and consequently bitter towards their masters. Indeed there were…
Gail Jarvis
May 26, 2014
Review Posts

The Unemancipated Country: Eugene Genovese’s Discovery of the Old South

This essay originally appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of Academic Questions (Volume 27, Number 2). On 26 September 2012, Eugene Dominic Genovese, one of the most influential and controversial historians of his generation, passed away at age eighty-two after a lengthy struggle with heart disease. His principal writings focused on the history of slavery and the Old South. Roll,…
Robert L. Paquette
May 21, 2014
Blog

Centennial Wars

Fifty years ago the master narrative of the Civil War Centennial failed to synchronize with the momentous 1960s Civil Rights movement. It minimized the roles of slavery and race. Instead the War was characterized as a unifying ordeal in which both sides fought heroically for their individual sense of “right” eventually becoming reconciled through mutual sacrifice. Slavery was considered only…
Philip Leigh
May 20, 2014
Blog

Centennial Wars

Fifty years ago the master narrative of the Civil War Centennial failed to synchronize with the momentous 1960s Civil Rights movement. It minimized the roles of slavery and race. Instead the War was characterized as a unifying ordeal in which both sides fought heroically for their individual sense of “right” eventually becoming reconciled through mutual sacrifice. Slavery was considered only…
Philip Leigh
May 20, 2014
Review Posts

A Bostonian on the Causes of the War, Part IV

Part IV (Final) from a section of Dr. Scott Trask’s work in progress, Copperheads and Conservatives. Part I. Part II. Part III. Massachusetts’ Politics It is one of the perils and paradoxes of democracy that it often bestows disproportionate power and influence upon a minority. Two-party democracies are the most susceptible to this reversal of the familiar and rather tiresome…
H. A. Scott Trask
May 19, 2014
Blog

Truth

At the annual reunion of the Alabama Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans I sat at the head table looking out at so many of my friends, compatriots and brothers of the South. It occurred to me that we share many commonalities beyond the lone fact that our ancestors all served under the same standard in a war that took place…
Carl Jones
May 19, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Rethinking the War for Southern Independence

(13th Annual Gettysburg Banquet of the J.E.B. Stuart Camp, SCV, Philadelphia) We human beings are peculiar creatures, half angel and half animal, as someone has said. Alone among creatures we have a consciousness of ourselves, of our situation, and of our movement through time.We have language, and by symbols can communicate knowledge to one another and across generations. We can…
Clyde Wilson
May 14, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

Devolution

Equipped with an abundant knowledge of history, Michael Tuggle has cast a discerning eye on the trends of the present. Not the ‘trendy’ trends but the real ones, those which can guide our steps into the future (as far as the future can be known to us mortals). The trends suggest to him something very hopeful – the probability and…
Clyde Wilson
May 14, 2014
Blog

Honouring Our Fathers

Presented at the SC Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Confederate Memorial Day Commemoration South Carolina Statehouse, Columbia, South Carolina 03 May 2014 It is my high honour and distinct privilege to be addressing you on this day and at this place; honouring the memory of our fathers at the Confederate soldiers’ monument—with its sentinel ever vigilant, eyes northward—flanked by the flag…
Paul C. Graham
May 12, 2014
Blog

Remember the Alamo!

T.R. Fehrenbach, author of the magisterial classic Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans, passed away late last year in San Antonio at the age of 88. I recently came by chance across his obituary in The New York Times, which is a museum quality specimen of the intellectual and ethical defects of current American journalism and “scholarship.” The…
Clyde Wilson
May 7, 2014
Blog

The Real Cornerstone Speech

From Bernard Thuersam's website: Senator Robert Toombs and the Cornerstone of the Confederacy “GENTLEMEN OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY: I very much regret, in appearing before you at your request, to address you on the present state of the country, and the prospect before us, that I can bring you no good tidings. We have not sought this conflict; we have…
Bernard Thuersam
May 7, 2014
Blog

Moonshiners

Stewart, Bruce E. Moonshiners and Prohibitionists: The Battle over Alcohol in Southern Appalachia. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2011. Interest in southern Appalachian history and culture is growing in the academy. Moonshining is one particular area that is beginning to fascinate both the scholar and history buff. From the popular Discovery Channel show “Moonshiners,” to the growing number of…
Samuel C. Smith
April 30, 2014
Blog

Southern Honour and Southern History

  In present day academia, one is guaranteed a celebrated career by inventing a new way to put the South in a bad light or a new twist on an old put-down. In the 1970s, Raimondo Luraghi, Eugene Genovese, and other historians were starting to pay some attention to the existence of a genuine aristocratic ethics in the Old South.…
Clyde Wilson
April 28, 2014
Blog

The Accommodating Mind of Wilbur Cash

A phenomenon that has always intrigued me is how certain books achieved importance not because of their literary merit or substance but because they accommodated the political trends of the time. This occurred because the Eastern establishment not only set the political trends, it also decided which books would be published, and its members wrote approving reviews of books it…
Gail Jarvis
April 24, 2014
Blog

Local Color

Every Southern town has a local historian, a life-long resident who loves the tales and culture of the region and its people. They are not professionals who have been indoctrinated by the graduate programs at the university. They aren't concerned with the fashionable theories about the South and many times know more about Southern history than the leading experts. They…
Brion McClanahan
April 8, 2014