Monthly Archives

June 2015

Review Posts

South Carolina’s “Long Train of Abuses”

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

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

Who looks at Lee must think of Washington; In pain must think, and hide the thought, So deep with grievous meaning it is fraught. Herman Melville, "Lee in the Capitol," April 1866. “Be of good cheer: the flag is coming down all over, and it’s coming down because Rand Paul is right: it is inescapably a symbol of bondage and…
John Devanny
June 26, 2015
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New From Southern Pens 3

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

America’s Red-Headed Stepchild

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

Way Down in the (Southern State of) Missouri

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

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

A Lady Champion of Free Trade

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

As residents here in the Tar Heel State know, the boards of several of the state's public universities have in recent weeks engaged in a high-profile campaign to change the names of historic and iconic buildings and landmarks on various campuses. First, the board of trustees of East Carolina University in Greenville decided to remove the name of Governor Charles B. Aycock (1901-1905) from an historic residence hall on…
Boyd Cathey
June 18, 2015
Review Posts

Abel P. Upshur

This essay is published in honor of Abel P. Upshur's birthday, June 17, 1790. Today, States’ rights are remembered as a legalistic excuse for the preservation of slavery – a part of the past best forgotten. One historian scoffs at the notion of “loyalty to the South, Southern self-government, Southern culture, or states’ rights,” declaring that “slavery’s preservation was central…
James Rutledge Roesch
June 17, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Goodbye to Gold and Glory

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

“Hang the Usurpers”

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

The Old and the New South

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

Lectures on the Constitution of the United States

Lecture I Having presented to you, young gentlemen, in some former lectures, my views of the character and principles of the several forms of government, and particularly of the representative and confederate, we will now proceed to a more accurate examination of our own political system, which has been professedly constructed upon the combined principles of popular representation and an…
Henry St. George Tucker
June 9, 2015
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The Tuckers of Virginia

If any American today were to listen to the nationalists in charge of either the political class or American education at large, they would get the sense that it is settled science that the American Union is comprised of one people held together by a national government with uncontested sovereignty over all matters foreign and domestic.  Certainly, States and local…
Brion McClanahan
June 8, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

St. George Tucker

  St. George Tucker's "View of the Constitution of the United States" was the first extended, systematic commentary on the new constitution after it had been ratified by the people of the several states and amended by the Bill of Rights. Published by a distinguished patriot and jurist in 1803, it was for much of the first half of the…
Clyde Wilson
June 8, 2015
Blog

Independence, Peace, and Prosperity

Jefferson Davis delivered this message to the Confederate Congress on 18 February 1861. GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA, FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS: Called to the difficult and responsible station of Chief Executive of the Provisional Government which you have instituted, I approach the discharge of the duties assigned to me with an humble distrust of my…
Jefferson Davis
June 5, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Confederate Connections

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

The Truth About Jefferson Davis

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

There is no more singular statesman or person in the history of American politics than John Randolph of Roanoke. Eccentric in the extreme, volatile, and often ill-tempered, this Saint Michael of the South, this scourge of corruption, was also capable of passionate attachments to his friends, his slaves, and his country, that is Virginia. The same man whose piercing gaze…
John Devanny
June 2, 2015
Review Posts

Randolph of Roanoke

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

This piece was originally published June 3, 2014 at the Abbeville Blog. Senator John Warwick Daniel (1842-1910) of Lynchburg, Virginia was a gentleman's gentleman. Daniel served in the U.S. Senate from 1887 until his death in 1910 and was known as "The Lame Lion of Lynchburg" after being severely wounded in the War for Southern Independence. He was shot through…
Brion McClanahan
June 1, 2015
Blog

May Top Ten

1. Lies My Teacher Told Me: The True History of the War for Southern Independence by Clyde Wilson 2. The Sesquicentennial of the War for Southern Independence as Symbolic of the Fallen State of the South by William Cawthon 3. Why the South Fought by Sheldon Vanauken 4. Was the Fourteenth Amendment Constitutionally Adopted by Forrest McDonald 5. Yet Another…
Brion McClanahan
June 1, 2015