From the Archives–A Plea for the Real Union

The Abbeville Institute website has existed in its current form since April 2014 when we relaunched and rebranded our online presence, a shade over a decade after the founding of the Institute. We wanted our online footprint to highlight our past, present, and future. Clyde Wilson was not only one of the founding members of the Institute, he has been recognized as one of the foremost Southern scholars of the last half-century, and he was integral to our mission of “exploring what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition.” His introductions to The Papers of John C. Calhoun challenged the simplistic “Defender of Slavery” narrative and offered both an objective analysis of the man and his time and a thorough review of the Jacksonian period. We leaned heavily on his work for website content in the early days of the organization and during our relaunch. I met Clyde in the spring of 1997 when he was 55 years old, just a few years older than I am now. He was actively producing excellent work on both the South and American politics in the late 1990s, as this talk from 1995 illustrates. Not much has changed, but you can still hear the youthful fire in his voice. We first ran this in April 2014, nearly twenty years after the event. We have grown exponentially since then, and I would surmise many of you did not see or hear it in 2014, or in 1995 for that matter. It deserves to be widely shared, and thus a “From the Archives” highlight today. This talk predated our organization, but it still resonates thirty years later. A shorter version can be found here.

Brion McClanahan

Brion McClanahan is the author or co-author of six books, How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America (Regnery History, 2017), 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save Her (Regnery History, 2016), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, (Regnery, 2009), The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution (Regnery History, 2012), Forgotten Conservatives in American History (Pelican, 2012), and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Real American Heroes, (Regnery, 2012). He received a B.A. in History from Salisbury University in 1997 and an M.A. in History from the University of South Carolina in 1999. He finished his Ph.D. in History at the University of South Carolina in 2006, and had the privilege of being Clyde Wilson’s last doctoral student. He lives in Alabama with his wife and three daughters.

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