Tag

War for Southern Independence

BlogReview Posts

Firepower

A review of Firepower: An American Civil War Novel (Independent, 2023) by Philip Leigh It is all so simple, the establishment historian writes. The typical Southerner was an illiterate, tobacco-chewing hayseed. The South—led by a handful of West Point stalwarts—resisted for four long years because of stubbornness, bravo, and the fact that they were far too stupid to realize they…
Samuel W. Mitcham
September 12, 2023
Blog

Neither Snow, Nor Rain, Nor Gloom of War

When New York City’s Central Post Office opened in 1914, it bore the inscription that was to become the United States Postal Service’s unofficial motto, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Those couriers began their official rounds in July of 1775 when the Second Continental…
John Marquardt
September 11, 2023
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Stephens’ Reflections on the “Cornerstone Speech”

Rod O’Barr’s recent blog “The So-Called ‘Cornerstone Speech’” The So-Called “Cornerstone Speech” – Abbeville Institute is really excellent. Over the years, the so-called “Cornerstone Speech” by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens has been cited as proof positive that slavery was the cause of the Confederacy. Rod O’Barr did a good job of debunking that, but he omitted one other…
Timothy A. Duskin
September 8, 2023
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The So-Called “Cornerstone Speech”

The so-called “Cornerstone Speech “delivered March 3, 1861, is one of the go-to documents of purveyors of the “Pious Cause Myth” in modern academia. This choice of title reveals their own deep-seated bias for a fabricated fashionable narrative popular among today’s academics. That narrative claims the War Against Southern independence was “all about slavery.” If you do not believe there…
Rod O'Barr
September 5, 2023
Blog

Deep Southern Summer Written at Midnight

Remember. This is a fought-for land There’s blood soaked in the soil. There’s tears within its waves And wails upon the shore Its tempests veil the shrieks Still heard from years of yore. There’s terror in its shades Dark places in its woods recall Much pain unthinkable. The pain must still remain It cannot sublimate so soon. The prayers of…
James Everett Kibler
August 25, 2023
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Look Away, Dixieland

Shortly after I returned from my first tour in Afghanistan, several friends invited me over to watch the 2008 war thriller The Hurt Locker, about an Explosives Ordnance Team serving in the Iraq War. I couldn’t make it halfway. I walked out, got in my car, and sat there, staring off into space and breathing heavily for a few minutes…
Casey Chalk
August 18, 2023
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Rethinking Gettysburg

It is near universally assumed that the battle of Gettysburg determined the failure of the Southern War for Independence. But is that too facile and summary a judgment? The battle may be considered something of a turning point, especially coming at the same time that Vicksburg was starved into surrender after an eight-month attack by superior numbers aided by heavily…
Clyde Wilson
August 17, 2023
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The Tariff as a Motive For Secession

Pious Cause apologists often dispute the claim that the South generated most of the federal revenue in the antebellum period. Yet a prominent Northern paper certainly believed that the South generated more than half of the tariff revenue that funded the federal gov’t. If the South was allowed to secede, the Daily Chicago Times, December 10, 1860, lamented: “In one single…
Rod O'Barr
August 16, 2023
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From Shiloh to Sapelo: Our Past Remains Unchanged

Every day, our modern culture erases more and more reminders from our Nation’s past, however the past remains unaltered. History can be rewritten, monuments and markers removed, and names on buildings, roads, bridges, schools, and even military bases and vessels replaced with different names, BUT the past remains unchanged. Only our interpretation of the past changes. Whether our Nation’s past…
Mike Brown
August 3, 2023
Blog

Lincoln vs. George III

Independence Day is supposed to be a celebration of the principles in the Declaration of Independence and our secession from the British Empire.  Yet every one of its main principles were repudiated by Lincoln with his words and, and more importantly, his actions.  Contrary to revisionist history, Lincoln was as guilty as King George III of committing atrocities against Americans. …
Carole Hornsby Haynes
July 31, 2023
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Secession and Economics

The following are some interesting historical tidbits from primary sources (emphasis added): Gabriel Manigault (1809-1888) was a South Carolina lawyer, author, and planter. He was a signer of the Ordinance of Secession, and he served in the South Carolina Ordnance Department with the rank of colonel. In a letter found in his family papers, Manigault writes urgently to Colonel James…
Karen Stokes
July 20, 2023
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Lincoln’s Path to War

In today’s parlance, the concept of secession not only connotes insurrection but even treason. However, in 1789, when the Constitution became the governing law of the United States, the right of secession was a hotly debated subject. Even during the two-year period of the document’s drafting and ratification, the seeds of secession were sown when some states demanded an amendment…
John Marquardt
July 17, 2023
Blog

A Confederate Bookshelf

Originally printed in The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History (1951) The appended brief Reading List of books on Confederate history is designed for those who do not aspire to become specialists but wish to have a moderate familiarity with the literature. Those who make their first adventure in the field will do well to…
Douglas Southall Freeman
July 10, 2023
Blog

The Real Real Jefferson Davis

Following the suggestion of a fellow Alabama Gazette columnist, I read through “Let’s celebrate the real history of Jefferson Davis”, by Josh Moon. No surprise—it is just more “Righteous Cause” blather. The sub-title claims the South fought to “protect” slavery, yet the institution was constitutionally legal and Abe Lincoln and the Republicans stated ad nauseum that they had no intention…
John M. Taylor
July 7, 2023
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How Confederates Helped End Slavery in the United States

About two weeks after Texas Confederates surrendered on June 2, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to take command of the state’s occupation troops on June Nineteenth. On that day he ordered soldiers to post bulletins around town notifying the public that all persons held as slaves had been freed by virtue of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on…
Philip Leigh
June 27, 2023
Blog

Rethinking Fort Sumter

Many prevailing assumptions about the War to Prevent Southern Independence are questionable summary judgments more akin to propaganda than careful understanding. This is certainly true of the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861.  It is assumed that “firing on the flag” was a justification for all patriots to rush to the defense of America and inaugurate a war…
Clyde Wilson
June 26, 2023
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Some Interesting Northern Opinions on the War

The philosopher and labour advocate Orestes Brownson, a staunch Union supporter, had this to say shortly after the war: “Nothing was more striking during the late civil war than the very general absence of loyalty or feeling of duty, on the part of the adherents of the Union . . . . The administration never dared confide in the loyalty…
Clyde Wilson
June 20, 2023
Blog

A Glaring Consistency

While other interests come and go, I believe the permanence of my obsession with Dixie is rooted in its manifestation of enduring principles, to which I am stubbornly loyal. Despite the Abbeville Institute’s dedication to the Southern tradition in its entirety, our study seems to hover around the Confederacy and the War for Southern Independence, and for good reason.  In…
Julie Paine
June 19, 2023
BlogPodcast

Ep. 2: Jefferson Davis’s Farewell Address

Ep. 2: Even just a few years ago, Jefferson Davis's January 1861 Farewell Address to the United States Senate was considered to be one of the most important speeches in United States history. Those who heard it both wept and cheered as Davis led several other Senators out of the chamber. The speech is one of the "essential Southern" documents…
Brion McClanahan
June 17, 2023
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More Unnoticed Facts About the War Between the States

William T. Sherman was a diagnosable manic-depressive. Such a man should not be in command of an army. Always with superior forces, he seldom won a battle. His famous “March” was almost entirely a terror campaign against undefended civilians. Republicans tried hard to get him to run for President which he refused with annoyance. His son became a Jesuit and…
Clyde Wilson
June 14, 2023
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A Birthday Salute to Clyde Wilson

On Sunday, June 11, 2023, my dear friend and a man who is rightly called “the Dean of Southern Historians,” Dr. Clyde N. Wilson, celebrated his 82nd birthday. For some fruitful fifty-five of those years he has been at the forefront of efforts to make the history of his native region better known, and, as events and severe challenges to…
Boyd Cathey
June 12, 2023
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A Critique of the Modern Historiographical Method

Recent surveys clearly demonstrate why “Civil War” history is so skewed to support Leftist ideology. Leftist ideologues dominate the modern history discipline by a 33:1 margin. Gone is any semblance of balance so necessary to the free exchange of ideas. Gone is the opportunity for reasoned evaluation of all viewpoints regarding secession and war. Gone is the very opportunity for…
Rod O'Barr
May 31, 2023
Blog

Unholy War

A review of Union Terror: Debunking the False Justifications for Union Terror Against Southern Civilians in the American Civil War (Shotwell Publishing, 2023), by Jeffrey Addicott. There have been a number of good books exposing the extent and brutal nature of the Union army’s war against  civilians in its invasion and conquest of the South. Karen Stokes, Walter Brian Cisco,…
Clyde Wilson
May 29, 2023
Blog

Defending Dixie’s Land

It is a well-established truth that the South, despite being under the ban of righteous mainstream “America” for two centuries, has always attracted admirers from outside. Intelligent and earnest admirers from above the Potomac and Ohio and from across the sea. It is still happening even in these terrible times when the South has been banished to one dark little…
Clyde Wilson
May 22, 2023
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The Mystery of the Great Seal of the Confederacy

In my April account of the British territory of Bermuda and its intimate relationship with both the South and the Confederacy, I had omitted one important factor . . . Bermuda’s role concerning the great seal of the Confederate States of America. The unusual history of the seal was so complex that I certainly felt the story merited its own…
John Marquardt
May 19, 2023
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Unnoticed Facts About the War Between the States

The great internal bloodletting of 1861—1865 is still a central event and great dividing line in American history. In our discourse today, both high and low, it is now pervasively declared that that great event was simply about suppressing “treason” and “slavery.” This is an abuse of history, using it as a weapon to enforce a party line rather than…
Clyde Wilson
May 16, 2023
Blog

Legal Justification of the South in Secession

From Confederate Military History, Vol I, 1899. The Southern States have shared the fate of all conquered peoples. The conquerors write their history. Power in the ascendant not only makes laws, but controls public opinion. This precedent should make the late Confederates the more anxious to keep before the public the facts of their history, that impartial writers may weigh…
J.L.M. Curry
May 12, 2023
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“I’d Gone with Mississippi”

In July I’m having my Southern Literature Club read Shelby Foote’s central chapter on the Gettysburg Campaign found in the second part of his literary masterpiece, The Civil War: A Narrative. When filmmaker Ken Burns began work on his greatest film, The Civil War documentary series, (which remains to this day PBS’s most watched presentation with 40 million viewers. I…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh
May 10, 2023
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The “Confederates Were Traitors” Argument is Ahistorical

Supporters of the Erasure & Destruction Commission, aka Renaming Commission, are fond of displaying their ignorance regarding the legal framework of the United States under the Constitution. Never is their misguided misapprehension more evident than when they declare that the Confederates were “traitors”. The charge is so unarguably counterfactual as to be absurd. While forgiveness (not forgetfulness) should be our…
Lloyd Garnett
May 4, 2023
Blog

Why The Confederacy Fell?

Of all people to go to when attempting to answer the question of why the Confederacy fell, there is probably no one more qualified than Jefferson Davis himself, the first and last president of the Confederate States of America. In an excerpt from his work, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, he writes, "The act of February 17,…
Cody Davis
April 28, 2023
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Lincoln and Fort Sumter

From The Journal of Southern History Vol. 3, No. 3 (Aug., 1937), pp. 259-288 When the Confederate batteries around Charleston Harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter in the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, they signaled the beginning of the most calamitous tragedy in the history of the American people. Because the Confederate authorities ordered the attack it is…
Charles W. Ramsdell
April 27, 2023
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Burning Head of Coals

Last week during the public comments segment of a Zoom meeting with an Army subcommittee advising Arlington National Cemetery about the future of its Confederate (Reconciliation) Memorial designed by Moses Ezekiel, I learned that some other countries are more respectful of their former opponents than is the Army’s Renaming Commission that wants to remove the memorial. Theron Walker of Charleston,…
Philip Leigh
April 13, 2023
Blog

A Tale of Two Black Seamen

In early 1864 Brigadier-General Robert F. Hoke was tasked with liberating the enemy-occupied and fortified town of Plymouth on the Roanoke River in northeastern North Carolina. He began formulating his attack with the naval assistance of the still-incomplete ironclad ram CSS Albemarle, which was literally built in a cornfield well upriver from Plymouth. The unfinished ship had its steam up…
Bernard Thuersam
April 12, 2023
Blog

The Confederate State of Bermuda

A year before the 1939 film version of Margaret Mitchell’s Southern classic “Gone With the Wind” premiered at Loew’e Grand Theater in Atlanta, Georgia, producer David O. Selznick and screenwriter Jo Swerling flew to the island of Bermuda aboard a Pan-American “Clipper.” There they spent the next two months working to finish the script for their epic film about the…
John Marquardt
April 11, 2023
Blog

Thy Troy Has Fallen

In recent research, I accidentally happened upon this beautiful, touching story of a dying poet’s tribute to Robert E. Lee, and thought readers would find it interesting. Like Lord Acton, the English poet Philip Stanhope Worsley was an admirer of the Confederacy and General Robert E. Lee. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Worsley was born in Greenwich…
Karen Stokes
March 29, 2023
Blog

Spin and Suppression

Dr. James McPherson is one of the leading historians of the post-60’s era. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1963, with the Highest Distinction. He is Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University where he taught for 25 years, and a former president of the prestigious American Historical Association. His book “Battle Cry of Freedom”…
Rod O'Barr
March 28, 2023
Blog

Union Terror

A review of Jeffrey Addicot, Union Terror: Debunking the False Justifications for Union Terror Against Southern Civilians in the American Civil War (Shotwell Publishing, 2023). As an attorney and terrorism expert, Dr. Jeffrey Addicott’s new book, Union Terror, focuses on the legal standards of conduct by soldiers toward civilians applicable during the American Civil War. It cites incidents when Northern…
Philip Leigh
March 23, 2023
Blog

Irish Confederates

Seemingly everything possible has already been written about the climactic battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—three nightmarish days of intense combat in early July 1863—that determined America’s destiny. Consequently, for people craving something new beyond the standard narrative so often repeated throughout the past, they were sorely disappointed by the new Gettysburg titles released for the 150th anniversary. In fact, this unfortunate…
Philip Thomas Tucker
March 17, 2023
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The Last Words

A review of The Last Words: The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States by Michael R. Bradley (Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2022) The idea for this book came when Mrs. Susan Harris asked Dr. Michael Bradley, “Is there a book about what officers said to their men when…
Brett Moffatt
March 16, 2023
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Memorials to a Lie

Reconcile: verb – 1st definition: restore friendly relations between; cause to coexist in harmony. Reconciliation: noun –1st definition: the restoration of friendly relations. For years, many beautiful Confederate monuments and sculptures have come under attack and been dismantled and possibly even destroyed. The one presently in the WOKE culture’s cross-hairs is a monument erected in our “national cemetery” – otherwise known as the purloined property of…
Valerie Protopapas
March 8, 2023
Blog

Southern Artist and Historian

African American Gregory Newson, a talented artist, was raised in New York but now lives and does his work in South Carolina.  He has made contributions, both in art and writing, to Confederate history that deserve to be better recognised. In 2016 he published Get Forrest, a beautifully illustrated biography. One could not ask for a more fair and interesting…
Clyde Wilson
March 3, 2023
Blog

The Destruction of Washington Street Methodist as a Metaphor

As Northern victory drew near in 1865, on the night of February 17/18 troops under General William T. Sherman set fire to the Washington Street Methodist Church in Columbia, South Carolina. Legend has it – highly plausible – that the soldiers intended to burn down the First Baptist Church. But when approached and queried by Union soldiers as to the…
Forrest L. Marion
February 23, 2023
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Getting the Truth “Out There”

The fictitious “history” of the great conflict between the two sections of the (formerly) “united” States has been ongoing for a long, long time. The present narrative, however, has been changed greatly in the last decade or so. Older folks such as myself remember that the whole conflict was “summed up” in what became known as The Grand Bargain, a…
Valerie Protopapas
February 16, 2023
Blog

The Republican Reign of Terror

From the 2005 Abbeville Institute Summer School. My subject is the Northern Reign of Terror in the Summer of 1861. But before we get to the actual atrocities, I have to set up why they happened by getting into the mind, not of the whole North, but of the Republican North. There is much evidence that Republicans conceived the War,…
H. A. Scott Trask
February 9, 2023
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Lincoln and Coincidence?

Oct 12, 1861, Confederate ambassadors James Mason and John Slidell set sail for England, Mason to be Minister to England and Slidell Minister to France. They were bound for England via Cuba where they boarded a British packet ship the HMS Trent. Was it mere coincidence that a Union warship, the San Jacinto, was notified by the US Consul in…
Rod O'Barr
February 8, 2023
Blog

The 518

The names, below, are a few of the 375,000 Confederate soldiers about whom Union soldier and president of the United States, William McKinley, said: . . . every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor . . . And the time has now come . . . when in the spirit of fraternity…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
February 1, 2023
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A Morsel of Genuine History

“A Morsel of genuine History, a thing so rare as to be always valuable.” ---Thomas Jefferson Recently a young professor wrote that Confederates had slandered and “dehumanised” Northern soldiers by giving them an unfavourable image.  Dehumanisation.  How awful and unfair! Those righteous Northern soldiers having their feelings hurt by mean old Southerners. A relevant fact is that the Yankees had…
Clyde Wilson
January 30, 2023
Blog

A Modern Black Man’s Confederate Journey

A review of Robert E. Lee's Orderly, A Modern Black Man's Confederate Journey by Al Arnold (Newson Publishing, 2015) I think it is safe to say that there isn’t a man alive who loves the South, particularly Mississippi, more than Al Arnold.  Over the Christmas season, I had the pleasure of making his acquaintance through a live Facebook interview conducted…
Julie Paine
January 26, 2023
Blog

Why Lee Still Matters

In Richmond, there’s a movement afoot to rename the Robert E. Lee Memorial Bridge. At Charlottesville, a statue to the Confederate general was removed last year. In Abilene, Texas, Lee Park, named after the general, has been changed to that of a local football coach. The list could go on and on, as we’ve all seen. But let’s step back…
Stephen Davis
January 25, 2023
Blog

An Englishman Meets General Jackson

Henry Wemyss Feilden, born in England in 1838, was the younger son of Sir William Feilden, a baronet. Young Henry entered the British Army, and after serving in India and China for a number of years, he decided to resign his commission and volunteer for service in the army of the Confederate States of America. On a winter night in…
Karen Stokes
January 20, 2023
Blog

A Better Light

Once, a mother watching her child searching diligently for something and seeing that she was having no success in her search, asked the tot where she had lost the missing item. The child replied, “I lost it over there,” pointing to the other side of the room. Somewhat confused, the mother said, “But if you lost it over there, why…
Valerie Protopapas
January 12, 2023
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Another Eyewitness to Union War Crimes

Dr. Daniel H. Trezevant, The Burning of Columbia, S.C., edited by Karen Stokes. Shotwell Publishing, 2022. Dr. Trezevant was a respected Columbia physician who experienced fully the Yankee robbing and burning of South Carolina’s capital by Sherman’s army in February 1865.  He wrote a series of newspaper articles just after, which became a pamphlet. Although there was a facsimile edition…
Clyde Wilson
January 3, 2023
Blog

The Political Economy and Social Thought of Louisa S. McCord

From the 2011 Abbeville Institute Summer School. The name of the lady I'm introducing today, the Southern intellectual Louisa Susanna Cheves McCord, or as she's usually called, Louisa S. McCord, is generally not well known today. In the antebellum era she was the author of numerous essays on political economy and social issues. Her other writings included poetry, reviews, and…
Karen Stokes
November 30, 2022
Blog

Thanksgiving: A Yankee Abolitionist Holiday

From the book, Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History (Facts on File, 1984). The long-standing practice of delivering political sermons on Thanksgiving Day, which made Thanksgiving both a revolutionary holiday and the occasion of Federalist era political contention, now made Thanksgiving the tool of free-soilers and abolitionists. Thanksgiving was, above all, a New England holiday, and New England was…
Diana Karter Appelbaum
November 22, 2022
Blog

Cook’s Cave

Introduction The Civil War served as the deadliest conflict in U.S. history. Most scholars agree there were around fifty to one hundred major battles. Outside of these major engagements were skirmishes ranging from the coast of Maine, to the desert of New Mexico, to the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas. While the historical battles ultimately led to the Union winning…
David Crum
November 4, 2022
Blog

Do Motives Matter?

A friend of mine translated a book on Lincoln written by Karl Marx in which her first installment was a refutation by Marx of the European press’s contention that the assault by the North on the South was not about slavery but economic and political power. Of course, one cannot divorce the issue of slavery from either consideration, but Marx…
Valerie Protopapas
October 24, 2022
Blog

We’ve Been Lied To

Much of what we’ve gotten from our “history” books has been wishful myth. Those who are the victors in wars and other world situations get to write the “history” books, in which they make themselves look good and their enemies look bad. The bad things they’ve done are either ignored or swept under the rug while their enemy’s faults are…
Al Benson
October 6, 2022
Blog

The Stranger in Gray

Outside of Portland, Maine, sits the small town of Gray. During the Civil War, the population was around 1,700 residents. While Gray has experienced growth, the area gives the vibe of a typical small American town. Though Maine is one of the least-populated states in the nation today, surprisingly, Mainers played a pivotal role in the U.S. Civil War, seeing…
David Crum
September 26, 2022
Blog

John Reagan Was Right

Texas Senator John Regan was right when he argued in the chamber three months before the opening Civil War shots at Fort Sumter: “Suppose the people of the South would today voluntarily surrender $3 billion in slave property and send their slaves at their expense to the free states, would you accept them as freemen and citizens of your States?…
Philip Leigh
September 23, 2022
Blog

A Hispanic Confederate

Because the ethnic diversity of the Confederate Army is not appreciated by many historians, Jason Boshers, the commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and J. Brian McClure, the commander of the Louisiana Division of the SCV, declared September “Confederate Hispanic Heritage Month.” The ethnically diverse Confederate Army included Irish dock workers in the Louisiana Tigers, the German Fusiliers who…
Samuel W. Mitcham
September 22, 2022
Blog

The Cry of the Vanquished

Owen Wister’s novel Lady Baltimore is the story of a Northern man spending time in South Carolina around 1905.  He is not your typical arrogant Yankee, but openly acknowledges the modern decay he sees in the North and is sympathetic to the South.  He is staying in a boarding house with a variety of guests; they include Juno, an elderly…
Julie Paine
September 12, 2022
Blog

The Confederate Army and God

This article was first published by Crossfire: The Magazine of the American Civil War Round Table and is republished by permission. Introduction The United States Civil War produced some very dark days in American history. Ideas and values separated the North and the South. The whole world watched as America was at war with itself. Having been established as a…
David Crum
September 2, 2022
BlogReview Posts

The 200 Most Important Confederate Books

In 1978, Georgia native Richard Harwell--older brother of the famous baseball broadcaster Ernie Harwell--published In Tall Cotton, a list of the 200 most important Confederate books. He asked fellow Georgian E. Merton Coulter to write the introduction knowing that this list would provide a valuable resource to those seeking to understand both Southern history and the Confederacy. Modern establishment historians…
Brion McClanahan
August 31, 2022
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Jefferson Davis on Robert E. Lee

Remarks of President Davis at the Meeting of the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors held at the First Presbyterian Church, Richmond, Virginia, November 3, 1870, for the purpose of organizing the Lee Monument Association, as reported in the Richmond Dispatch for Nov. 4, 1870. Robert E. Lee was my associate and friend in the military academy, and we were friends until…
Abbeville Institute
August 30, 2022
Blog

For the Fairfax County Confederate Dead

Editor's note: Delivered by Congressman John Warwick Daniel at the dedication to the Confederate monument at the Fairfax County, Virginia courthouse October 1, 1890. The monument stood on the courthouse square "upon Fairfax soil" on a lot purchased so the "grassy mound at the base of this monument now covers the remains of two hundred heroes." Funds were collected in…
Abbeville Institute
August 24, 2022
Blog

Northern Negrophobia

No doubt the media and the activists tearing them down justify the destruction of Confederate monuments on the premise that the South fought to perpetuate slavery and the North entered and fought the Civil War to end it. Today’s academics are comfortable acquiescing to that false public impression because it serves their anti-Southern agenda. Only if directly asked, “Did the…
Philip Leigh
August 23, 2022
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Lord Lyons and the Sectional Conflict, 1859-1861, Part 2

By early January 1861, South Carolina had seceded from the Union and stood alone as an independent republic. In the ensuing weeks, six additional Southern States would follow suit. Lame-duck President James Buchanan did nothing to stop the dissolution of the Union, mainly because he did not believe he had any authority to coerce a state, but also preferring to…
Ryan Walters
August 9, 2022
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Lord Lyons and the Sectional Conflict, 1859-1861, Part 1

In 1859 the Union of American States entered the final stages of its greatest crisis, one that would eventually split the country in two. America was then a young republic but growing larger and stronger with each passing year. Yet North and South were growing apart, seeing the world through a different lens. The North was more industrial, while the…
Ryan Walters
August 2, 2022
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The Ballad of Confederate Abolitionists

I am a descendant of a family of Confederate soldiers, and I have been told I should be embarrassed.  A liberal activist told me recently that all Confederates were racist degenerates who deserve nothing except desecration of their statues and memorials.  I usually avoid deep discussions of this topic on social media, because the predicted result is that people don’t…
Tom Daniel
July 25, 2022
BlogReview Posts

The Encyclopedia of Confederate Generals

A review of The Encyclopedia of Confederate Generals (Regnery History, 2022) by Samuel Mitcham The valor of the Confederate Army is one of the greatest stories in American history. Southerners needed brilliant leaders because they faced such overwhelming odds. They were outnumbered four to one and outgunned a hundred to one. The author’s purpose of the book is to make…
Jeff Wolverton
July 21, 2022
Blog

Ulysses S. Grant’s Failed Presidency

Below is a footnote-free version of the Preface from my U. S. Grant's Failed Presidency (2019). Ulysses Grant's presidency deserves a fresh analysis because modern historians and biographers have praised him too much. Initially, their "rehabilitation" of his previously mixed reputation concentrated on his military performance during the Civil War, but more lately it has included his presidency. In 1948,…
Philip Leigh
June 20, 2022
Blog

Randolph Shotwell in War and Prison

We live in a regime with an industrial output of lies about Southern history, so we should let our forebears speak for themselves whenever we can.  I have been reporting  on little known  Southern books and here is another. Randolph Shotwell in the 1880s put together some materials for his an account of his extraordinary life,  using his diaries, letters…
Clyde Wilson
June 17, 2022
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Remembering Gods and Generals

Lest we forget, it has been nineteen years since the film “Gods and Generals” was released to screens across the United States—to be exact, on February 21, 2003—almost ten years after the release of the blockbuster film, “Gettysburg.” “Gods and Generals” was based on the historical novel by Jeff Shaara, while “Gettysburg” was based on a work by his father,…
Boyd Cathey
June 9, 2022
Blog

The Confederate Constitution

From the 2003 Abbeville Institute Summer School I come from a somewhat different mold and my thought processes on these issues have changed a bit over the last couple of years. I have written on American jurisprudence and I have detected what I would deem to be ominous trends in American case law, and also in international law. I also…
Marshall DeRosa
June 6, 2022
Blog

Recommended Books about the South and Its History

A friend recently asked me for a list of good books about the South and “the Late Unpleasantness” which he could share with his two sons, one of whom will be entering college this fall, and the other who will be a high school senior. I began naming some volumes, at random. But my friend stopped me in mid-sentence and…
Boyd Cathey
May 31, 2022
Blog

Armistead Burt: A Friend to Jefferson Davis

On a recent visit to Abbeville, South Carolina I visited the Burt-Stark House, one of the main historic attractions of the town and the prime reason for my visit there. Followers of the Abbeville Institute website who also have an interest in Jefferson Davis may know that Abbeville claims it as the site of Davis’ last war council on May…
Thomas Hubert
May 20, 2022
Blog

Acknowledging the True Cost of the War

Alfred Emanuel Smith (1873 – 1944) was an American politician who served four terms as Governor of New York and was the Democrat Party’s candidate for president in 1928. Smith grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan and resided in that neighborhood for his entire life and though he remained personally incorrupt, as with many other New York City…
Valerie Protopapas
May 19, 2022
BlogReview Posts

Blacks in Gray

A Review of Blacks in Gray Uniforms (Arcadia, 2018) by Phillip Thomas Tucker South Carolina Confederate history is my area of research, so I was interested to come across the book Blacks in Gray Uniforms, which gives information on some black Confederate soldiers from the Palmetto State, and I wanted to bring it to the attention of the readers of…
Karen Stokes
May 18, 2022
Blog

In the Saddle with Stonewall

The best of the many Confederate memoirs, in my opinion, are those of General Richard Taylor (Destruction and Reconstruction) and Admiral Raphael Semmes  (Memoirs of Service Afloat and Ashore). There are also many excellent women’s diaries and memoirs, perhaps a subject for another occasion.  Taylor and Semmes were men in high places, intelligent and experienced, keen judges of character, and…
Clyde Wilson
May 13, 2022
Blog

Honorable and Courageous Patriots

Delivered at the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Park for the Confederate Memorial Day remembrance held April 30, 2022. Thank you for taking time today to consider the deeds and lessons of our long-dead ancestors. When Confederate commemoration began, it was a memorial to people who were known to those living.  Today, it is unlikely that there is a person here…
Martin O'Toole
May 12, 2022
Blog

Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural

It has been over a century and a half since Lincoln’s assassination did much to deify his image and place him as the centerpiece of the American Pantheon. Such behavior is hardly unexpected; as the leader of his country during America’s deadliest war, a war directed towards enacting unprecedented changes in the structure of government and American society, Lincoln’s partisans…
Shaan Shandhu
May 9, 2022
Blog

President Grant is Overrated

A recent article in the politically conservative National Review about Ulysses Grant’s presidency by historian Allen Guelzo is merely another example of unjustified claims that he was a virtuous champion of black civil rights. To be sure, Grant promoted Southern black suffrage but that was because he knew they were nearly certain to vote for him and his Republican Party.…
Philip Leigh
May 3, 2022
Blog

God’s General

Neither side in the War for Southern Independence produced a finer or more morally upright man than Richard Montgomery Gano. He was the descendent of a distinguished military/evangelical family. His great-grandfather, John Allen Gano, was born in New Jersey and became a Baptist preacher. He joined the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, where he was known as “the fighting…
Samuel W. Mitcham
April 28, 2022
Blog

Did the Confederacy Oppose the Rule of Law?

Today is Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama. Most Americans believe the War and Southern history are synonymous, so much so that to many, the War has come to define the South. If you are reading this post and have followed the Abbeville Institute for any length of time, you know that our mission to "explore what is true and valuable…
Brion McClanahan
April 25, 2022
Blog

Common Cause and Common Fate

Mr. President--I fully concur with the gentleman from Montgomery, in the propriety of immediately passing the resolution now under consideration. All the powers of the State of Alabama should be pledged to aid in resisting any attempt to coerce a seceding State back into the Union. Sir, the Southern States recognize the right of secession. It constitutes the very essence…
Lewis M. Stone
April 20, 2022
Blog

The War of Secession

A line from Shakespeare asked, “What’s in a name?” In the case of the great American conflict of 1861, the name by which it has become generally known is, of course, the "Civil War." This term was, however, only occasionally used during the war, such as Lincoln’s reference in his 1863 Gettysburg Address that the country was “engaged in a…
John Marquardt
April 12, 2022
Blog

Emancipation

Part 4 in Clyde Wilson’s series “African-American Slavery in Historical Perspective.” Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Many Americans doubtless tend to assume a rosy view of emancipation, of brave boys in blue rushing into the arms of newly freed slaves to celebrate the day of Jubilee while handing out Hershey bars to children. Nothing could be further…
Clyde Wilson
March 29, 2022
Blog

The 1862 Louisiana Native Guard

In April 1861, a public meeting was held in New Orleans, Louisiana to discuss Governor Thomas O. Moore's call for volunteers to defend the South against the invading Union army as the War Between the States was just beginning. This particular meeting did not consist of white men, however. It was led and attended by what the newspapers called the…
Shane Anderson
March 28, 2022
Blog

Lincoln, Putin, and Yankee Hyopcrisy

At the writing of this article, the ongoing struggle between Ukraine and Russia has most people’s attention.  While prayerfully hoping for a peaceful settlement of this conflict, it is difficult to overlook the actual hypocrisy of the Federal government and U. S. media as they deal with the reported issues such as “saving the union,” “secession,” and “war crimes.”  It…
Walter D. (Donnie) Kennedy
March 23, 2022
Blog

A War to Free the Slaves?

Part 3 in Clyde Wilson's series "African-American Slavery in Historical Perspective." Read Part 1 and Part 2. In 1798 Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Taylor: “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 and substance.” He added…
Clyde Wilson
March 22, 2022
Blog

Stonewall Jackson’s Scabbard Speech

Originally published in the Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. 16. 1888 While the Virginia Convention of 1861 was in session in Richmond, wrestling with the weighty problems of the day, and the grand old “Mother of States” was doing all in her power to prevent the terrible strife which her breast was so soon to bear, there occurred at Lexington,…
William A. Obenchain
March 4, 2022
Blog

Secession Declarations Do Not Prove the War was over Slavery

ACADEMIA'S ABSOLUTE PROOF that the War Between the States was fought over slavery is based primarily on the declarations of causes for the secession of four of the first seven Southern states to secede: South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas. However, those four declarations prove nothing of the sort. There were 13 Southern states represented in the Confederate government. That…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
February 25, 2022
Blog

South Carolina in 1865

There is nothing new under the sun, but there are things which have lain undiscovered, forgotten, or neglected, and these can be brought to light. In my new book South Carolina in 1865, I have collected unpublished, obscure, and neglected records which document events and conditions in the Palmetto State during the last year of the war. The most cataclysmic…
Karen Stokes
February 23, 2022
Blog

Beyond the Hunley

As far back as the days of ancient Greece and Rome, people have dreamed of various means of underwater travel and warfare. Over two thousand years ago, Alexander the Great even devised a type of diving bell that allowed his Macedonian troops to make surprise underwater attacks on enemy positions. It was not until two millennia later, however, that an…
John Marquardt
February 21, 2022
Blog

Who Was Francis Lieber?

The opening of this essay is from my segment of the documentary Searching for Lincoln under the heading: Lincoln and Total War. Herein I mentioned the claim that the “Lieber Code” of war – General Order 100 – was somehow unique illustrating that the concerns of Lincoln, his Administration and his military was the humane waging of war: Despite growing…
Valerie Protopapas
February 8, 2022
BlogReview Posts

The Yankee’s Lee

This essay was originally published in the First Quarter 1992 issue of Southern Partisan. A Review of: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (UNC Press, 1991) by Alan T. Nolan When Frank Owsley sought from among the vast number of interpretations of the cause of the war of 1861 for the principal cause, he defined it as “egocentric…
David Bovenizer
January 19, 2022
Blog

Slavery and Abolitionism as Viewed by a Georgia Slave

After 200 years of digesting Enlightenment ideals of natural rights, and reciting a pledge that concludes with “liberty and justice for all,“ it is hard for us to realize there are circumstances when slavery could be considered a “positive good.” John C. Calhoun has lately been excoriated for taking this position. Yet in 1861 an educated Georgia slave named Harrison…
Rod O'Barr
January 12, 2022
Blog

How the British Viewed the War

But most significant of all was the attitude assumed by the Federal Government in dealing with the secession of the South. Long before that secession some of the best observers had clearly pointed out how the influence of climate, and much more the special type of industry and character which slavery produced, had already created a profound and lasting difference…
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
January 11, 2022
Blog

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

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

Abraham Lincoln’s Pyrrhic Victory

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

The Coerced Soldiers of the USCT

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

Adding Monuments

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

Secession Isn’t Treason

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

The Right Side of History

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

Missouri’s Road to Secession

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

When in the Course of Human Events

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

Our Marxist Revolution

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

Lincoln’s Total War

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

“Shrines The Heart Hath Builded”

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

Washington vs. Lee

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

The Last Address

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

So, it was a Civil War after all…

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

You Lost. Get Over It

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

The Truth About Tariffs and the War

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

Historical Context Explains Secession

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

The South’s Monument Man

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

The Amendment That Never Was

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

The True Cause of the War Between the States

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

John Pelham and the “Myth of the Lost Cause”

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

Aristotle vs. Hobbes–The Cause of the Great War

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

Lincoln and the Border States

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

The Latin South

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

The Righteous Cause Myth Strikes Again

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

Secession Was Not About Slavery

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

Is Secession Treason?

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

On “Good Uses” for the Confederate Flag

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

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

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

Robert E. Lee: The Soldier

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

Twitter Historians Distort History, Again.

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

Robert E. Lee: The Father

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

The “First Shot” Revisited

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

The Yankees Take Up the White Man’s Burden

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

Only A House Divided Within Itself Will Stand

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

Robert E. Lee and Me

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

Our Other Man in Charleston

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

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

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

Crimes Against Humanity

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

Total War in Georgia

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

Racism and Reputation

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

Don’t Watch This Film

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

A Night to Remember

The diary of Emma LeConte is one of the best known documents chronicling the sack and destruction of Columbia, South Carolina. On February 17, 1865, the city surrendered to the besieging army of General William T. Sherman. His soldiers pillaged the city throughout the day and in the evening set fires that would destroy much of the place. Emma LeConte’s…
Karen Stokes
February 17, 2021
Blog

The Last “Insurrection” According to the Political Establishment

The Washington establishment, led by a senile 78-year-old man who can barely speak in complete sentences and seems permanently fighting mad, is hell- bent on labeling virtually all Americans who voted for President Trump –Republicans, Independents, and Democrats — as “insurrectionists.”  They have invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 to justify placing thousands of heavily-armed National Guard (and other) troops…
Thomas DiLorenzo
February 9, 2021
Blog

A Good Reason to Honor Robert E. Lee

Yesterday’s melee in Washington provides good reason to honor Robert E. Lee because he demonstrated how he maintained dignity in defeat while convincing many resentful Southerners to reconcile with their former enemies. At the end of the War Between the States in 1865 he had as much reason as any Southerner to reject reconciliation, but he didn’t do that. To…
Philip Leigh
January 19, 2021
Blog

The Tarnished Tarheel

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1851 phantasmagorical image of slave life in the South has long been regarded as one of the sparks that ignited the War Between the States.  However, a now almost forgotten anti-slavery polemic by the North Carolina abolitionist Hinton Rowan Helper did far more to inflame the nation at that time than did “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  In fact,…
John Marquardt
January 13, 2021
Blog

A (Maryland) Southern Hero

Early in the civil war President Lincoln had Federal Troops occupy the State of Maryland.  Though the power vested only with the US Congress, Mr. Lincoln also took it upon himself to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus (the right of trial) throughout Maryland and eventually throughout the entire Union.   Mr. Lincoln also authorized his military commanders to imprison and…
Paul Callahan
January 8, 2021
Blog

The Blundering Generations and the Crisis of Legitimacy

Crises of legitimacy are rarely resolved without some resort to violence. The European experience in the seventeenth century is generously populated with examples: The English Civil War, Le Fronde I and II, The Thirty Years War, The Great Deluge that rocked Eastern Europe and the Polish Commonwealth. Even the Glorious Revolution, that peaceful coup launched by Anglicans and Whigs against…
John Devanny
December 18, 2020
Blog

Virginia and Alabama

Lexington, Virginia January 2002 Driving up, then down the mountain hairpins into Lexington,By daylight, moonlight, headlight (only one),I smell the moist ancient earth rising up to greet meThis January evening that seems almost like spring.Incredible! Time has collapsed around me. I sit on a wooden bench on the lawn of the Holiday Inn ExpressIn shirt sleeves accompanied only by Jack…
Thomas Hubert
December 17, 2020
Blog

A Red and Blue Divorce?

The red and the blue—states that is-- are as different as the colorless black and white landscapes absent from the color spectrum. The concept of separate states for separate cultures is as old as Canaan and Egypt. The concept of separation for moral law is as old as these two, as well. Today on any given "news" outlet, maps are…
Paul H. Yarbrough
December 14, 2020
Review Posts

James Henley Thornwell and the Metaphysical Confederacy

A review of The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Second Edition; Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1999) by James Farmer The role of religion leading up to the War Between the States is sometimes overlooked. However, there is no question that Christian clergy had a major influence on the Old South, including the politics…
Zachary Garris
December 8, 2020
Blog

The War in the Pacific

The dramatic events leading up to the secession of the Southern States, the tragedy of the War Between the States and the ensuing final act of the South’s Reconstruction period were, for the most part, staged east of the Mississippi River, as well as in the waters surrounding the East Coast.  A lesser part of the drama was played out…
John Marquardt
December 7, 2020
Blog

The Gettysburg Fairy Tale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zksz7mOggqI&feature=youtu.be The Gettysburg Address is perhaps the most iconic speech in American history. Students are required to memorize it, and it has become as important to American political culture as the United States Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. This is unfortunate, because in this speech, Abraham Lincoln invented history and by doing so intellectually nuked the original federal republic.…
Brion McClanahan
December 3, 2020
Blog

Mr. Lincoln’s “Lost Speech”

"May 29, 1856 "Abraham Lincoln, of Sangamon, came upon the platform amid deafening applause. He enumerated the pressing reasons of the present movement. He was here ready to fuse with anyone who would unite with him to oppose slave power; spoke of the bugbear disunion which was so vaguely threatened. It was to be remembered that the Union must be…
Vito Mussomeli
December 2, 2020
Review Posts

Edmund Kirby Smith

A review of General Edmund Kirby Smith C.S.A. (LSU Press, 1992 (1954) by Joseph H. Parks This biography is a must read for any student of the War for Southern Independence in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. It is an informative broad overview of Smith’s life and career, while also humanizes the man who was often subject to heavy criticism during and,…
Wes Franklin
December 1, 2020
Blog

The South Was Right! (Again)

The South Was Right! by James Ronald Kennedy and Walter Donald Kennedy. New Edition for the 21st century.  Shotwell Publishing, 2020. In 1991 the Kennedy brothers first published The South Was Right!, a classic that can be considered a key document in the modern movement of Southern awareness and activism.  With a second edition in 1994, the book has sold an astonishing 180,000 copies.…
Clyde Wilson
November 24, 2020
Blog

The Great Lie and the Real Controversy

The following address was delivered as part of a symposium at the 150th anniversary of the burning of Winnsboro, S.C., in February 2015, sponsored by the Winnsboro Historical Society. It is published here for the first time. By preface, I have one common-sense comment on the manufactured controversy over who burned Columbia. An army who torches and pillages every town…
James Everett Kibler
November 19, 2020
Review Posts

John Brown’s Body

A Review of The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement (Uncommon Books, 1993) by Otto Scott. The Leftist political violence that has engulfed the disintegrating American nation for much of the past year traces its origin on the North American continent to the infernal life of the original American terrorist, John Brown. Like the terrorists of today who…
Neil Kumar
November 17, 2020
Blog

The False Cause Narrative

While watching a seventy-minute interview with Professor Adam Domby about his book, The False Cause, I was surprised at the number of errors, biased interpretations and even endorsement of "extralegal" conduct by anti-statue mobs. The False Cause focuses on Civil War and Reconstruction memory, particularly involving Confederate memorials. First, and foremost, Domby erroneously proclaims that the signature Confederate statues erected in Southern courthouse squares between…
Philip Leigh
November 10, 2020
Blog

A [r]epublican in Exile

In Washington, D.C., while serving as Secretary of War in the 1850s, Jefferson Davis met Ambrose Dudley Mann, a native of Virginia who was the Assistant Secretary of State (and the first man to hold that office). The two men were drawn to each other immediately and became fast friends for the rest of their lives. In her biography of…
Karen Stokes
November 5, 2020
Blog

It Began With A Lie

“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 the principles for which the South contended and which justified her struggle for those…
Valerie Protopapas
November 2, 2020
Blog

How Arizona Seceded From the Union

The United States acquired a vast area of the Southwest with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (May 30, 1848), which included all or part of the following states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, Texas and Utah. As part of the treaty, Mexico agreed to sell the land (more than 1,000,000 square miles) to the United States for $15…
Steve Lee
October 22, 2020
Blog

A Simple Explanation

What separated the Jeffersonian understanding of government embraced by the South from the philosophy of Lincoln and the people of the North? For if Lincoln had believed as Jefferson, the war would not have happened. Indeed, it is probable that the circumstances leading up to the war would not have happened. So, what in fact, did happen?! Truth to tell,…
Valerie Protopapas
October 14, 2020
Blog

Was Secession Treason?

Recently an acquaintance of mine remarked that the Confederate statue in her hometown should be removed from its present place of honour and relocated to the Confederate cemetery which is presently (and sadly) in a state of neglect. The statue should be moved, she said, because while the boys who fought and died during the Late Unpleasantness deserve to be…
Earl Starbuck
September 18, 2020
Blog

Marxists, Conservatives, and Neocons

Reading an article in the latest Hillsdale College newsletter Imprimis I was shocked by the outrageous comparison of Lebron James and Colin Kaepernick with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as people fighting to “divide the nation.” The article was adapted from the speech, “American Sports Are Letting Down America,” in an online Hillsdale lesson by prominent black sports columnist,…
Carole Hornsby Haynes
September 17, 2020
Blog

They Were Not Traitors

A typical calumny directed at Confederate soldiers is that they don’t merit commemoration because they were traitors. It is a lie for two reasons. First, the Confederate states had no intent to overthrow the government of the United States. They seceded merely to form a government of their own. The first seven states that seceded during the winter of 1860-61…
Philip Leigh
September 16, 2020
Blog

As Luck Would Have It

The tiny hamlet of Lake Hill in New York State’s Catskill Mountains was my mother’s hometown, and her ancestors there, the Howlands, could trace their family history to its roots in Fifteenth Century England and to Bishop Richard Howland of Peterborough who officiated at the burial of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587.  During the next century, Henry Howland sailed…
John Marquardt
September 14, 2020
Blog

Brain Dead Neocons

A recent article in Hillsdale College’s newsletter “Imprimis” compared Lebron James and Colin Kaepernick to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in wanting to “divide the country.”  On a lessor point, it was in a figurative reference to the battle of Gettysburg, which Jackson wasn’t even present at, of course, being dead by then. The article was taken from an online…
Wes Franklin
September 4, 2020
Blog

A Monument Worthy of a Hero

Eight-tenths of a mile down a dead-end Arkansas gravel road, at that dead end, past two neglected old cattle guards and in the back pasture is not where you’d expect to find a hero, much less a monument to him and his men. But, alas! There he is, lying in all of his humble glory. There are no official monuments…
Travis Archie
August 28, 2020
Blog

The Fire Eater

Edmund Ruffin, the consummate Fire-Eater, was far greater than the sum of his parts; as Avery Craven, the finest of his biographers, expressed, “as the greatest agriculturist in a rural civilization; one of the first and most intense Southern nationalists; and the man who fired the first gun at Sumter and ended his own life in grief when the civilization…
Neil Kumar
August 26, 2020
Review Posts

New Confederate Territory

A review of Cleburne: A Graphic Novel (Rampart Press, 2008) by Justin S. Murphy and others. The graphic novel is a major feature of literature in these times.  Southerners can indeed be happy that the Confederacy has entered this field in grand style.  Murphy is a nationally notable animator, writer, publisher, composer, and prize-winning dramatist from Florida.  As a youth…
Clyde Wilson
August 25, 2020
Blog

“False Story” Historiography

“Madam, don't bring your sons up to detest the United States Government. Recollect that we form one country now. Abandon all these local animosities and make your sons Americans.” -Lee writing to a Southern mother, with a heart wrenching of hatred towards the North. Source: Proceedings & Debates, 2nd Session of the Seventy-First Congress, United States of America, Vol. LXXII-Part 8, United…
Gerald Lefurgy
August 17, 2020
Blog

Jeff, Judas, and Mr. James

During the War of Northern Aggression not every Southerner was on board for the Cause. Not every Yankee was opposed to the Cause. The numbers, apparently, from the action of four years of massacre and bloodshed indicate that each of the other sides saw few who crossed over. So be it. Or so it was. Records are probably not available…
Paul H. Yarbrough
August 14, 2020
Blog

Missouri’s War

A Review of Matt: Warriors & Wagon Trains During the Civil War (Amazon, 2019) by James Michael Pasley. Ordinarily, I don’t endorse novels. As a general rule, I don’t even read them. But after my wife suggested I read Matt: Warriors & Wagon Trains During the Civil War, I couldn’t put it down, so I decided to make an exception…
Samuel W. Mitcham
August 11, 2020
Blog

The Atlantic Gets It Wrong, Again

I don’t have time to detail everything the piece in question gets wrong, because it's a lot. I’m sure this will be fodder for Abbeville posts for a long time, so I’m going to focus on the Constitutional issues. Stephanie McCurry writes: “In late February 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, the seven breakaway states formed the C.S.A.; swore in a president,…
Aaron Gleason
July 28, 2020
Blog

Why the Civil War Wasn’t About Slavery

From the 1870s to the late 1950s, there was an unofficial truce between the North and South. Each side recognized and saluted the courage of the other; it was conceded that the North fought to preserve the Union and because Old Glory had been fired on, and the Southerner fought for liberty and to defend his home; the two great…
Samuel W. Mitcham
July 22, 2020
Blog

The Real Legends and Lies of the “Civil War”

I caught a snatch of news the other day that, even with all that is happening in our time, stunned me. It seems that Hollywood is gearing up its machinery to produce entertainment about “Confederate War Crimes.” This so contradicts the historical record that it can represent nothing but willful ignorance, dishonesty, and malice.  For Hollywood, anything they don’t like…
Clyde Wilson
July 16, 2020
Blog

19th Century Fake News

While Fake News may be a new term, the concept has a long history.  We have been taught that a free, independent, and ethical press is essential for a free society to function and thrive; however, in practice, the American press has typically been far from these ideals. The press has been most malicious in times of crisis, acting not…
James (Jim) Pederson
July 14, 2020
Blog

The Problem With Lincoln

“The problem with Lincoln is the problem with America,” said my friend Clyde Wilson when I asked him for a blurb for my new book, The Problem with Lincoln (Regnery, 2020).  That in fact is the theme of the book, written seventeen years after my first book on the subject, The Real Lincoln (TRL), as I shall explain.  A secondary…
Thomas DiLorenzo
June 29, 2020
Blog

Tucker and the Confederacy

Tucker Carlson, a man who had revealed himself as a reliable reporter/journalist over the years, in my opinion, stumbled recently. His nightly show, like most, has been confronted with the contemporary left-wing anarchic news happenings. Anarchy brings with it, anarchic news.  By its very nature, bestial conduct becomes the news story of the moment(s). And for the most part fake…
Paul H. Yarbrough
June 24, 2020
Blog

A Voice of Reason

Today, as it was a hundred and sixty years ago, America stands on the edge of an ever-widening chasm of cultural, ideological, political, racial and sectional divisions.  In 1860, there was at least one prominent voice of reason that cried out to end the nation’s mad rush into the abyss, that of Charles Mason of Iowa.  Mason was a Northern…
John Marquardt
June 23, 2020
Blog

An Interview with Clyde Wilson, Part III

“Southerners who still value their heritage but don’t know what to do about it in such a hostile environment. They are our audience.” DM: What is your best short answer to people who say the War for Southern Independence was all about slavery and nothing but slavery? Should we come at this from an offensive posture, rather than being defensive,…
Clyde Wilson
June 16, 2020
Blog

Remember Missouri

People remember Missouri as a Union rather than a Confederate state.  Even those who are not offended by the memory of the Confederacy are either unaware Missouri seceded from the Union or refuse to recognize Missouri’s secession because it was not done “properly.”  Considering the attitudes and underhanded politics common in the 1860s, what exactly does proper mean?  When most…
Jason Welch
May 20, 2020
Blog

How Secession and War Divided American Presbyterianism

Presbyterianism has a rich legacy in American history. The Presbyterian church was founded in Scotland by John Knox (d. 1572), a disciple of John Calvin. Along with the Dutch Reformed and New England Puritans, the Presbyterians brought Reformed theology to the New World. Scottish and Irish immigrants introduced Presbyterianism to the American colonies in the 18th century, and the first…
Zachary Garris
May 12, 2020
Blog

No Comparison Between Grant and Lee

Over a century and a half has passed since Confederate States General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant. Yet, despite surrender by one and victory by the other, controversy continues regarding which man better represents the virtues of honor, duty, and American patriotism. For those who believe that might makes right, then…
James Ronald Kennedy
April 27, 2020
Blog

The All American Perspective

An outlook is bleak when nothing worse can be said than the truth. To this end, there is no 'sugar-coating' the elements of obliteration, subjugation, necrosis and above all, 'Hatred', in all its ugly forms, (physical, racial, social, ad infinitum), that were part of the Civil War/War Between the States', (CW/WBTS), conduct and legacy. That is beyond dispute and this…
Gerald Lefurgy
April 15, 2020
Review Posts

Grant a Better General Than Lee? No.

A review of Grant and Lee: Victorious American and Vanquished Virginian (Regnery History, 2012) by Edward Bonekemper, III. I don’t think a person of sound mind and impartial understanding of the so-called Civil War could get past the second paragraph of the introduction of Edward H. Bonekemper III’s book Grant and Lee: Victorious American and Vanquished Virginian without realizing that…
Joe Wolverton
April 14, 2020
Blog

The South in Arms…What Might Have Been

Literature, be it works of fact or fiction, might well be described as a window through which the reader is invited to view the world as the author chooses to see it.  Between fact and fiction though there is a third world in which the writer is granted literary license to transform the two other worlds into the fantastic realm…
John Marquardt
April 8, 2020
Blog

The Duty of the Hour

The first thing I learned about Lieutenant-General Nathan Bedford Forrest was that he had twenty-nine horses shot out from under him in battle; in my fifth-grade social studies class, I remember thinking to myself that the most dangerous thing one could be was one of Forrest’s horses. The unconquerable Tennessean was bold, severe, and uncompromising in the discharge of his…
Neil Kumar
March 25, 2020
Blog

Violence Breeds Violence

Estimates of the number of South Vietnamese civilian casualties during the U.S. war in Vietnam vary. A U.S. Dept. of Defense estimate put the numbers at 1.2 million, including 195,000 killed.  In 1975, a U.S. Senate sub-committee put the total at 1.4 million casualties, including 415,000 killed. The majority of those killed were women and children. In 1995, the Vietnamese…
Norman Black
March 20, 2020
Blog

The Economy, Stupid

Just as the Earth revolves on its axis each day and travels around the Sun in an equally regular pattern, so has world history tended to be cyclical in nature throughout the centuries, with many episodes seemingly being repeated countless times over.  In many cases the basic cause behind such recurring cataclysmic events as war, radical changes in political systems…
John Marquardt
March 13, 2020
Review Posts

The Myth of the Lost Cause

A review of The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won (Regnery History, 2015 ) by Edward Bonekemper The late Edward H. Bonekemper III had a bachelor’s degree from Muhlenberg College and a master's degree in American history from Old Dominion University. He also had a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. He retired…
John C. Whatley
March 10, 2020
Blog

Bernie Sanders and Simon Legree: Real and Imaginary

Bernie Sanders wants to bring back slavery. This raises the question: can he have the 13th Amendment repealed? Who says that it hasn’t already been repealed? Bernie says, among other Communistic pronouncements, that “health care is a right.” Well, if that is so, then someone: doctor, nurse, medic, etc must provide it. That is unless Bernie, the Commie, means that…
Paul H. Yarbrough
March 6, 2020
Blog

To Guard the Precious Dust of the Martyred Dead

Today there is a frenzied effort to tear down memorials to the Confederate dead. If you think "frenzied" is too strong a word, take a look at video of the crowds in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who resembled (ironically) a lynch mob as they threw ropes around a metal soldier and dragged it to the ground, all the…
Shane Anderson
February 26, 2020
Blog

Confederate Christmas

It was Thursday, Christmas day of 1862, and the guns at Fredericksburg had fallen silent just ten days before with over ten thousand Union soldiers of the Army of the Potomac and half that number of Confederates from the Army of Northern Virginia lying dead or wounded beyond the city. That night, a twenty-one year old cannoneer from Richmond, Lieutenant…
John Marquardt
February 21, 2020
Review Posts

The Craggy Hill of Slavery

A review of It Wasn't About Slavery: Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Regnery History, 2020) by Samuel Mitcham On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must and about must go, And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so. John Donne, Satire III As John Donne so correctly informs…
Walter D. (Donnie) Kennedy
January 28, 2020
Blog

A Southerner’s Movie Guide, Part VI

8. The War for Southern Independence (continued): Fantasy and Fraud Scorcese’s Gangs of New York (2002) Martin Scorcese, in an interview, candidly described his Gangsof New York, as an “opera.”  He had been asked whether the event s portrayed were true to history.  I took his reply to mean that the events of the movie were selected and organized for…
Clyde Wilson
January 23, 2020
Blog

Charge! and Remember Jackson

Lieutenant-General Thomas Jonathan ‘Stonewall’ Jackson was the greatest martyr of our Cause, the first icon of the War for Southern Independence. He was the archetypal Christian soldier; there is infinite wisdom to be gleaned from his life. In death, he has ascended to the status of myth; even in life, as a chaplain once expressed, “Nobody seemed to understand him…when…
Neil Kumar
January 22, 2020
Review Posts

Two Lees

A review of Robert E. Lee at War: Hope Arises from Despair (Legion of Honor Publishing, 2017) by Scott Bowden and The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won (Regnery History, 2015) by Edward H. Bonekemper III. Did Robert E. Lee lose the War for the South? If you believe…
Brion McClanahan
January 21, 2020
Blog

A Southerner’s Movie Guide, Part V

Symbols Used ** Indicates one of the more than 100 most recommended films.  The order in which they appear does not reflect any ranking, only the convenience of discussion (T)   Tolerable but not among the most highly recommended (X)   Execrable.  Avoid at all costs  7. The War for Southern Independence (continued):  The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly **Searching for…
Clyde Wilson
January 16, 2020
Blog

A Southerner’s Movie Guide, Part IV

Symbols Used ** Indicates one of the more than 100 most recommended films.  The order in which they appear does not reflect any ranking, only the convenience of discussion (T)   Tolerable but not among the most highly recommended (X)   Execrable.  Avoid at all costs  6. The War for Southern Independence **Gone with the Wind  (1939). What to say about this…
Clyde Wilson
January 9, 2020
Blog

What Religious Statistics Can Tell Us About The War Between the States

The role of religion, specifically evangelical protestant religion in the North, is frequently emphasized by gatekeeper historians in framing the causes and consequences of the War Between the States. This stands today as a sort of creation myth for the recreated Nation. Because survey data on individual religious affiliation and participation is not available for this time period, anecdotal evidence…
James (Jim) Pederson
November 22, 2019
Blog

Confederates Were Not Traitors

Confederate statue critics increasingly argue that the monuments should be torn down because they honor traitors. Among such advocates is Christy Coleman, CEO of the Richmond’s American Civil War Museum. While the most common response to her interpretation is to argue that secession was possibly legal, but a more compelling point is that President Andrew Johnson pardoned the soldiers no later than…
Philip Leigh
November 13, 2019
Blog

The Real Reason for “Civil War” Monuments

In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released the “Whose Heritage?” report on the Confederate symbols in the United States.  This report had one thesis: The Confederate monuments, memorials, and namesakes were erected during the “Jim Crow” era to vindicate white supremacy without consideration of other factors.  The report was based on undocumented sources, but the charting of monuments…
Ernest Blevins
November 7, 2019
Review Posts

The Real Thing

A Review of The Everlasting Circle: Letters of the Haskell Family of Abbeville, South Carolina, 1861—1865. (Mercer University Press, 2019) Edited by Karen Stokes. Participants in the Old South and the Confederacy were conscientious in preserving their documents, as were several succeeding generations.  They knew that their history was important and that it would suffer massive misrepresentation.  As a result,…
Clyde Wilson
November 5, 2019
Blog

How Yankees Fostered Southern Disease

In August of 1862, two years before his infamous ‘March to the Sea’, General William T. Sherman declared, “Salt is eminently contraband.” The Southern leaders’ positioning of the South’s economy as dependent on cash crops created well-known shortages of many sorts. One aspect of this approach concerned the use of money acquired from cash crops to purchase food and salt.…
Vann Boseman
October 31, 2019
Review Posts

The Secession Movement in the Middle States

A review of The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973) by William C. Wright (WCW) "Historical writing during the Civil War and immediately after noted the existence of these men. As the years passed, however, historians came to accept the view that Lincoln had the full support of the North prior to the attack…
Vito Mussomeli
October 29, 2019
Blog

Behind Enemy Lines

Just before Christmas of 1860, the chain of events that was to soon to lead the nation into four bloody years of undeclared war began with South Carolina exercising its constitutional right to leave the Union and revert to its original status as a sovereign entity.  Six of South Carolina’s neighboring States quickly followed her out of the Union and…
John Marquardt
October 23, 2019
Blog

“My Countrymen”

Charles Francis Adams was the grandson and son of former-Presidents John and John Quincy Adams. It ​is therefore of little surprise he himself embarked on career and life of public prominence as an educator, ​newspaperman, politician, statesman and historian. Yet, while he never assumed the high offices which the ​chieftains of his famed family did, the great contributions which Adams…
Gerald Lefurgy
October 18, 2019
Blog

What the Newspapers Said: The Black Confederate “Myth” Examined

Where did the belief in the "black Confederate soldier" originate? Did it begin in 1977, after the success of the television mini-series Roots caused people to reevaluate race and slavery during the Civil War? Were stories of these men absent before then, as one of many historians who tackles this topic claims? Is it accurate or indeed fair to describe…
Shane Anderson
October 9, 2019
Blog

How the Neocons are Helping Destroy Western Civilization

Every now and then an acquaintance who reads what I write will ask me: “Boyd, why are you so critical of writers and commentators—Neoconservatives—like Victor Davis Hanson, Ben Shapiro, Brian Kilmeade, and those who appear on Fox News? Why do you seem so condemnatory of articles and essays that show up in, say, National Review or The Wall Street Journal?…
Boyd Cathey
October 4, 2019
Review Posts

To Die in Chicago

A review of To Die in Chicago: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas (Pelican, 1999) by George Levy The dead are buried somewhere in Chicago and there are over 4,000 of them—that much we know. Treatment was just as harsh in most other Northern prison camps - worse in Elmira. But at least they keep better track of the corpses produced.…
David Wade
September 10, 2019
Blog

The War Between the Dreams

Old slave and planter graves a flight apart For thrushes eating seeds of grass and yew, The unmarked plots and plots with dates and names Too weatherworn to trace and know in stone, Bones sinking toward a spring no well can reach, 600,000 dead for whom the War Has long since ended and will never end, The blue and gray…
David Middleton
September 4, 2019
Blog

Rediscovering Heritage

Lack of attachment to culture, heritage, and tradition is the death of a nation. As a child, I had very little in-depth knowledge of my family’s history. Most of my extended family had died from old age by the time of my birth except for my maternal grandfather, Nelson Pace and great aunt, Mary Paul Pittman Smyrl, both natives of…
Nicole Williams
August 28, 2019
Blog

Louisiana’s Warrior Governor

Louisiana is a state accustomed to incredibly incompetent and corrupt public officials, especially in the governor’s office. Some of my fellow Louisianans will be surprised to know that one of their former chief executives was a model of competence, ability, courage, and self-sacrifice. One Pulitzer Prize-winning historian even suggested that, had the South recognized his talents earlier, the results of…
Samuel W. Mitcham
August 26, 2019
Blog

Black Southern Support for Secession and War

Sooner or later any student of the War for Southern Independence will run across discussion of "black Confederates," which may well be the most controversial topic related to the war. From an objective standpoint it might seem odd that there is any controversy at all. The South had a large black population in 1861, mostly slave but some free, and…
Shane Anderson
July 22, 2019
Blog

The Neo-Confederate SCOTUS Justice

On February 4, 2002, a current member of the United States Supreme Court gave the following remarks at Loyola University, in New Orleans: a tribute to Judah P. Benjamin, a former U.S. Senator who resigned and took part in the secession of Louisiana.  He was quickly appointed to a cabinet post by President Jefferson Davis: first as Attorney General, and subsequently…
Rev. Larry Beane
July 19, 2019
Blog

Defending the South Against Fake News

I had some correspondence with an editor of the Post and Courier this week when I sent them a letter for publication in response to their July 6, 2019 editorial "Don't let extremists define our national symbols." As a result, I saw an opening to send some valuable Southern history to this newspaper and I jumped on it. Their editorial…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
July 18, 2019
Blog

A History Lesson for Ted Cruz

I am always annoyed when a conservative political leader attacks Southern heritage. I don’t know why because with the present-day crop of cowardly politicians, it is becoming routine, but I am. Unwittingly or not, these modern day Scalawags adopt the “politically correct” line, even though they know (or should know) that political correctness is nothing more than a euphemism for…
Samuel W. Mitcham
July 15, 2019
Blog

Secessionville

Battle of Secessionville Commemoration Address by Gene Kizer, Jr. on the battle site at Fort Lamar Heritage Preserve on James Island in Charleston, South Carolina June 15, 2019. This was a memorial service honoring the 157th anniversary of the brilliant Confederate victory of June 16, 1862. The Battle of Secessionville was an extremely important battle because, if the Confederates had…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
June 24, 2019
Blog

Abraham Lincoln Crushes Civil Liberties in Maryland

Abraham Lincoln is widely regarded as one of the nation's greatest Presidents. He is the subject of at least 15,000 books. A popular poem (later set to music) responded to Lincoln's call for troops in biblical terms: "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.…" Upon Lincoln's death, Bishop Horatio Potter wrote that " glorious career of service and…
Michael Schearer
June 6, 2019
Blog

Dignity and Peace

Catholic and non-Catholic Southerners alike have reason to mourn the loss of Father James Schall, S.J., who passed away shortly before Easter at the age of 91.  As an erudite representative of an older generation, Father Schall preserved for the benefit of the 21st-Century a perspective that has been largely swept away with the many communities and neighborhoods upon which…
Jerry Salyer
May 30, 2019
Blog

The Inescapable Anti-Americanism of the Left

It’s telling indeed that while everyone, irrespectively of political partisanship, can’t refer to “racism” enough, few people, if any, want to spend any time at all talking about “anti-Americanism.” The remotely curious should want to know why the topic of anti-Americanism has seemed to have fallen into disrepute. I have a theory: Democrats and the left would prefer not to…
Jack Kerwick
May 29, 2019
Review Posts

Adventures in the Southwest

A Review of Doniphan’s Expedition, Containing an Account of the Conquest of New Mexico . . .  by John T. Hughes.  Cincinnati, 1847 and Reid’s Tramp, or a Journal of the Incidents of Ten Months Travel Through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Sonora, and California by John Coleman Reid.  Selma, Ala., 1858. The Mexican War and its aftermath turned American attention…
Clyde Wilson
May 21, 2019
Review Posts

The Real Cause

A review of For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Oxford, 1997) by James McPherson Miss Emma Holmes of Charleston, SC, and a survivor of the War Between the States, has left us one of innumerable diaries from the South about the conflict of 1861-1865 (see The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861-1866 edited by John…
W. Kirk Wood
April 30, 2019
Blog

Ode to the Confederate Dead

Row after row with strict impunityThe headstones yield their names to the element,The wind whirrs without recollection;In the riven troughs the splayed leavesPile up, of nature the casual sacramentTo the seasonal eternity of death;Then driven by the fierce scrutinyOf heaven to their election in the vast breath,They sough the rumour of mortality. Autumn is desolation in the plotOf a thousand…
Allen Tate
April 29, 2019
Blog

Sins and Virtues of “Civil War” History

History is remembered as a narrative, not facts and figures. If the story is told from the viewpoint of past sins, the rendering condemns our ancestors and makes us ashamed of our legacy. If it is told from the viewpoint of ancestral virtues, it leaves us proud of our tradition and inspired to build upon the accomplishments of those who…
Philip Leigh
April 26, 2019
Blog

A Copperhead Loves the South

CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS  22 April 2019 American by birth -- Southern by the grace of God!  I come from a true Southern state, South Dakota, and I am honored to be probably the first Dakotan to give the Memorial Day address at the capital of the Confederacy. Last week I had a conference call with a man from Michigan,…
John A. Eidsmoe
April 25, 2019
Blog

The South and the American Union

Stretching from the Potomac River across the southeastern quarter of the United States in a broad arc into the plains of Texas is a region known geographically and politically as “the South.” That this region has been distinctive by reason of its climate, type of produce, ethnic composition, culture, manners, and speech is known to every citizen of the country.…
Richard M. Weaver
April 22, 2019
Review Posts

Yankee Empire

A review of Yankee Empire: Aggressive Abroad and Despotic at Home (Shotwell Publishing, 2018) by James Ronald and Walter Donald Kennedy The Kennedys have fired a well placed shot across the bow of the Yankee Empire designed to illuminate the history of the past 150 years.  This book is a bonfire in the night, shedding light on some of the…
Brett Moffatt
April 9, 2019
Blog

Teach Your Children Well

Compatriots, how do y'all seek to maintain alive the Confederate heritage within your family & relatives? This would be a great discussion point for any Sons of Confederate Camp or United Daughters of the Confederacy Chapter. At the time of the Southern War For Independence, my ancestors were fighting my beloved French. It was a war that lasted 29 hard…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh
April 4, 2019
Blog

The French Lady: A Most Agreeable Gentleman

“Fatti Maschii Parole Femine”1 In July of 1861, Union troops aboard the Chesapeake Bay steamer the Mary Washington found the “privateer” Colonel Richard Thomas Zarvona hiding in one of her cabins.  Aided by some sympathetic passengers, he had removed the bottom of each drawer of a dresser and had curled himself up inside of it.  Zarvona’s arrest brought to an…
J.L. Bennett
March 28, 2019
Blog

Lee, Virginia, and the Union

The Hall of Fame recently dedicated at New York Uni­versity was conceived from the Ruhmes Halle in Bavaria. This structure on University Heights, on the Harlem river, in the borough of the Bronx, New York City, has, or is in­tended to have, a panel of bronze with other mementos for each of one hundred and fifty native-born Americans who have…
Fred H. Cox
March 27, 2019
Blog

Patrick Cleburne

The sketch is necessarily imperfect, from the want of official records. Most of these were lost or destroyed by the casualties attending the close of the war, and those still in existence are difficult of access. Of Cleburne’s early life little is known. The record of his service in the Southern armies belongs to the yet unwritten history of the…
William J. Hardee
March 18, 2019
Blog

Lord Acton: Confederate Sympathizer

“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Among Catholic students of political thought, few figures are more liable to provoke vigorous debate than does that famous dictum’s author, Cambridge history lecturer John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, a.k.a., the First Lord Acton, Catholic godfather of classical liberalism. Where Acton’s critics identify classical liberalism as a theory incompatible with the Catholic faith,…
Jerry Salyer
February 20, 2019
Blog

Pro-Confederate Television

In this age of political correctness it may surprise people that there were three TV series that portrayed Confederates in a good light. All three are very good and all the episodes of two of the series are available on DVD, and some of the episodes of the other series is available. The first series is Yancy Derringer. Yancy Derringer…
Jeff Wolverton
February 15, 2019
Blog

Did Ulysses Grant Own and Rent Slaves?

Even among the most Grant-partial historians there’s no denying that Ulysses Grant and his wife owned slaves prior to the Civil War. In fact, “Ulysses Grant” is the correct answer to a crafty American history trivia question that asks: “Can you name the last slaveholding President?” As growing political correctness causes our culture to increasingly condemn historical figures connected with…
Philip Leigh
February 8, 2019
Blog

Kentucky’s Confederate Sons

Suffering from a nasty bacterial infection, the insomnia induced by a lamp kept lit in his cell at all hours, and the very real possibility of being hanged by a kangaroo court, Jefferson Davis drew strength during his postbellum imprisonment from a certain slender little volume that was once renowned throughout Christendom – the The Imitation of Christ.  The Imitation…
Jerry Salyer
January 30, 2019
Blog

The South and Germany

I hope that no one who reads this paper will suppose that I have any feeling in the matter. I am only correcting errors in Northern writers, and I trust that, after more than half a century since the war between the States, this may be done without exciting any sectional bias. On the other hand, I have no idea…
Lyon G. Tyler
January 25, 2019
Review Posts

A Thousand Points of Truth

A review of A Thousand Points of Truth: The History and Humanity of Col. John Singleton Mosby in Newsprint (ExLibris, 2016) by V.P. Hughes Valerie Protopapas (who writes under her maiden name V.P. Hughes) has given us a massive work on Confederate guerilla fighter, Colonel John Singleton Mosby (1833-1916). Her tome, which reaches over eight-hundred pages, is made up of…
Paul Gottfried
January 22, 2019
Blog

Southern Conservatives

The South is and always been conservative. But with the constant hammer of political correctness and political falsehood (redundant?) pounded on it, it has waffled among many who brand it as evil. Punchy from the blows, it has sought to defend itself in the wrong places: In presentism and with Republicans. Republican and Air Force veteran Mike Hill, the first…
Paul H. Yarbrough
January 18, 2019
Blog

Franklin Pierce, Political Protest, & the Dilemmas of Democracy

On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which free-soil hecklers forced him to address his ideas on slavery. “He was not in favor of it,” the Concord Independent Democrat reported. “He had never seen a slave without being sick at heart. Slavery was contrary to the Constitution in some…
Michael J. Connolly
January 17, 2019