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… »
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,… »
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… »
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… »
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… »
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… »
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!… »
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… »
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… »
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,… »
