Tag

Thomas Jefferson

Clyde Wilson Library

Steady Habits and Chivalry

The burden of our endeavour in this conference is to examine the great morality play of Northern Good versus Southern Evil that is the conventional history of anti-slavery in the United States. This convention dominates not only our understanding of the sectional conflict of the 19th century but colours all of American history with a self-serving distortion that Robert Penn…
Clyde Wilson
August 25, 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

Bellamy’s Pledge

The Pledge of Allegiance is neither a sacred American tradition nor a patriotic duty, but a relatively recent piece of propaganda penned specifically to eradicate the memory of America’s revolutionary heritage and to indoctrinate the American people into believing lies about their history. If General George Washington ever heard the Pledge, he would not have put his hand on his…
James Rutledge Roesch
June 18, 2014
Review Posts

A Compact Theory?

States’ rights are anathema to the historical profession, viewed as nothing more than a specious pretext for chattel slavery. A prominent, Pulitzer-winning court historian of the “Camelot” Administration dubbed states’ rights a “fetish.” Another Pulitizer-winning scholar of what he outrageously terms the “War of Southern Aggression” claims that to Southerners, “liberty” was just a code word for “slavery.” A past…
James Rutledge Roesch
May 29, 2014
Review Posts

Caveat, America, Emptor

Probably no man in America in 1800 knew more about, or cared more passionately for, republicanism than Thomas Jefferson. It was the common belief that a true republic had to be of a fairly limited size, on the model of the Greek republics, in which Athens, at perhaps 200,000 was the largest, or the Italian republics of the middle ages,…
Kirkpatrick Sale
May 27, 2014
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James Monroe and the Principles of ’76

James Monroe was born today (April 28) in 1757. He is one of the more misunderstood and maligned Presidents of the United States. Historians typically rank him as no better than "average." This is unjust and an indictment of the historical profession. Monroe, they suggest, lacked leadership and energy in the executive office. He should have been more like Lincoln…
Brion McClanahan
April 28, 2014
Review Posts

The Eighteenth Century to the Twentieth

  Judged by the quality of the men it brought to power the eighteenth-century Virginia way of selecting political leadership was extremely good; but judged by modem standards of political excellence, it was defective at nearly every point. As for voting qualifications, there was discrimination against women, poor men, and Negroes. There was no secrecy in voting, and polling places—only…
Charles S. Sydnor
April 23, 2014
Blog

1865 and Modern Relevance

"I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy....Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more…
Carl Jones
April 16, 2014
Review Posts

‘Counsellors That Feelingly Persuade Me What I Am:’ Jefferson and Fletcher on Education

In an age such as ours—beset by the conceit that the noblest political act is individual self-actualization—any philosophic discussion of education will be tenuous and fragile. True, our time has witnessed heated debates over educational policy—over the processes through which public schools are funded, over the criteria by which educators’ performance is evaluated, over the students injured by our current…
Jefferson Viridi
April 15, 2014
Blog

Illegal, Unconstitutional, and Unjust

The historian Andrew C. McLaughlin in 1932 wrote that the British imperial system was characterized “by diversification and not by centralization....The empire of the mid-eighteenth century was a diversified empire” with power “actually distributed and exercised by various governments.” British colonies, including Ireland, “had long existed” as “bodies, corporate, constituent members of the Empire,” each with its own constitution and…
Brion McClanahan
April 15, 2014
Blog

Getting Right with Mr. Hamilton?

“…the borrower is servant to him that lendeth” (Proverbs 22:7) “There is an elegant memorial in Washington to Jefferson, but none to Hamilton. However, if you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country . . .” (George Will, Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy, 1992)…
John Devanny
April 6, 2014
Media Posts

Jefferson vs. Lincoln

This two part lecture by Abbeville Institute founder Don Livingston concentrates on the dichotomy between Thomas Jefferson's conception of Union and Abraham Lincoln's "national" argument. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CAYAkt3KFY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JpuADcC2bM
Donald Livingston
April 3, 2014