Monthly Archives

May 2016

Blog

Long Live the Flags of Dixie!

This piece was originally printed at AntoniusAquinas.com. On May 19, the House of Reprehensibles passed a proposal that would essentially ban the display of Confederate flags from national cemeteries.  The amendment was added to a Veteran Affairs spending bill. Not surprisingly, House Speaker Paul Ryan allowed the measure to be voted upon in hopes of not disrupting the appropriations process. …
Antonius Aquinas
May 31, 2016
Review Posts

The Battle in Virginia Over the Constitution

This essay is reprinted in honor of Patrick Henry's birthday, May 29, from Moses Coit Tyler's Patrick Henry. The great convention at Philadelphia, after a session of four months, came to the end of its noble labors on the 17th of September, 1787. Washington, who had been not merely its presiding officer but its presiding genius, then hastened back to…
Moses Coit Tyler
May 30, 2016
Podcast

Podcast Episode 28

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 23-27, 2016. Topics: Political Correctness, agrariansim, the Southern tradition, Reconstruction https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-28
Brion McClanahan
May 28, 2016
Review Posts

Our American Cultural Revolution

Delivered April 16, 2016 as The 2016 Murray N. Rothbard Memorial Lecture at the Mises Institute, Auburn, AL. As the person who has been asked to deliver this year’s Murray N. Rothbard address, it seems appropriate to relate my remarks to the person being honored. Although the observations that follow may not have come directly from Murray, he and my…
Paul Gottfried
May 27, 2016
Blog

Southern Reparations Have Already Been Paid

As the Sesquicentennial of Reconstruction progresses and the popular press debates whether slavery merits reparations, few students of the era realize that Southerners have already paid a form of reparations; if not for slavery, then as a penalty for the war. As the table below illustrates, for at least twenty-five years after the war three items represented more than half…
Philip Leigh
May 26, 2016
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XXXIII

I am not a Catholic, but I just have to admire all of this Pope’s meticulously photographed and internationally broadcast acts of humility.--Conservative Pundit Do you think the Civil Rights Act would have passed in 1964 if most Northerners had thought that it would apply to them and not just to the South?--Clyde Wilson The Massachusetts Kennedys are better than…
Clyde Wilson
May 25, 2016
Review Posts

Agrarianism and Cultural Renewal

This essay was originally printed at The Imaginative Conservative. Among the contributions to I’ll Take My Stand, Allen Tate’s “Remarks on the Southern Religion” is usually interpreted as the most acerbic, immoderate, and unusual essay in the collection. All too often the essay is read as an apologia for violence or an eccentric defense of tradition. In fact, Tate–like his…
H. Lee Cheek, Jr.
May 24, 2016
Blog

Southern Family

What makes the South, the South?  Most modern Americans would say football and grits sprinkled with a bit of country music and NASCAR. These clichés hold true for many Southerners today, but what made the South before the commercialization of the American economy was a commitment to land, family, and God.  It was both a temporal and a spiritual understanding…
Brion McClanahan
May 23, 2016
Podcast

Podcast Episode 27

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 16-20, 2016. Topics: Abraham Lincoln, War for Southern Independence, Political Correctness, Progressivism, Southern History, Southern Literature, Southern Culture, the United States Constitution https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-27
Brion McClanahan
May 21, 2016
Blog

Betrayed by Yankees Perverting the Constitution

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

Thomas Jefferson vs. Paul Krugman, Alan Greenspan, et. al.

This post was originally published at The Deliberate Agrarian. Paul Krugman is a popular guy these days. The American economist was awarded a Nobel prize in Economics this year. In a recent interview I heard Krugman say that no one person is responsible for America’s current financial crisis. But, he said former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan certainly deserves a…
Herrick Kimball
May 19, 2016
Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XXXII

I believe that the American South, the last bastion of Christianity in the West, will have a special role in the final chapter of history.--Anne Wilson Smith I just may take a tomahawk to the next person who tells me this is a nation of immigrants.  I want them to have the authentic experience. --Alice Teller Fact is, we NEED immigrants…
Clyde Wilson
May 18, 2016
Review Posts

Southern Voices

Southern Voices: Poems by William H. Holcombe, M. D. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1872. We hail this volume as a beautiful presage of the future of the South in the department of poetry In saying that it is worthy of the author, who, for several years past, has been a brilliant star in the literary firmament of the…
Albert Taylor Bledsoe
May 17, 2016
Blog

Hampton Roads: A Twist in the Lincoln Myth

According to the standard narrative maintained by the North, Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation brought about a new moral aim that justified a particularly bloody conflict. The act is often described as a device that would usher in a new age where angelic Northerners suddenly abandoned their racist past in favor of a fair, more equitable course for enslaved men. From…
Dave Benner
May 16, 2016
Podcast

Podcast Episode 26

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 9-13 2016. Topics: Political Correctness, Progressivism, Southern History, Confederate History, Secession, the United States Constitution https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-26
Brion McClanahan
May 14, 2016
Blog

The Imperial and Momentary We

This piece was originally published in Chronicles Magazine, October 2012. “O Fame, O Fame! Many a man ere this Of no account hast thou set up on high.” —Boethius “It is a kind of baby talk, a puerile and wind­blown gibberish. . . . In content it is a vacuum.” —H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding’s speeches Americans are a…
Clyde Wilson
May 13, 2016
Blog

A Christian Defense of the South

It is said that the more things change, the more they stays the same. This has proven more than a mere cliche in the aftermath of the horrifying events in Charleston, SC last year. When racial animosity failed to materialize in the wake of the shootings at a predominantly African-American Church, Progressive political elements made the call to eliminate Southern…
Thomas Bryant
May 12, 2016
Blog

“Don’t Leave Me Here to Bleed to Death!”

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

Remember Us

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

Defend to the Death

When I was young, there was a very famous and much articulated saying, to wit: “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it!” Everyone—or at least everyone who was rational, moral and decently educated—knew that this was the creed of a free society in general and “America” in particular.…
Valerie Protopapas
May 9, 2016
Review Posts

Women of the Southern Confederacy

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

Podcast Episode 25

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 2-6 2016. Topics: Political Correctness, Northern hypocrisy, Southern history, Southern culture https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-25
Brion McClanahan
May 7, 2016
Blog

Secession of the Heart

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

Erasing Southern Culture and History, Step by Step

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

Shades of John Brown

Southerners who honour their Confederate forebears have often been admonished:  “Get over it.  You lost!”    The admonishers often do not follow their own advice.  As a modest but earnest  advocate  of Southern heritage, I  have quite often been threatened, usually anonymously, with harm to my person and a renewal of the  extermination campaign against my people.  I once received from…
Clyde Wilson
May 4, 2016
Review Posts

Is “White Supremacy” an Exclusively “Southern” Ideology?

“We abhor the doctrine of the "Types of Mankind;" first, because it is at war with scripture, which teaches us that the whole human race is descended from a common parentage; and, secondly, because it encourages and incites brutal masters to treat negroes, not as weak, ignorant and dependent brethren, but as wicked beasts, without the pale of humanity. The…
Brion McClanahan
May 3, 2016
Blog

“Contextualizing” American History

Few, if any, currently prominent historians voice unqualified objection to the destruction of Confederate monuments. The most tolerant among them instead suggest that the memorials should remain, but with new explanatory inscriptions offering “context”—a code word that simplifies to: South=Bad, North=Good. Consider, for example, the contextual marker that might be added to Liberty Hall, former home of Confederate Vice President…
Philip Leigh
May 2, 2016
Podcast

Podcast Episode 24

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, April 23-29, 2016. Topics: The PC attack on the South, Andrew Jackson, secession, Confederaphobia https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-24
Brion McClanahan
May 1, 2016
Blog

April Top Ten

The top ten articles for April 2016: 1. Andrew Jackson: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by James Rutledge Roesch 2. Confederaphobia: An American Epidemic by Paul C. Graham 3. Why the War Was Not About Slavery by Clyde Wilson 4. The Cause of Jackson is the Cause of Us All by James Rutledge Roesch 5. Lies My Teacher…
Brion McClanahan
May 1, 2016