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The Land They Loved

A review of The Land They Loved, Vols. I and II (Shotwell Publishing, 2022, 2024). Clyde N. Wilson, known rightly as the dean of southern historians today—the most learned, the most honest—has a marked literary bent, which he has turned to the service of his homeland. Under the collective title The Land They Loved, he has assembled two volumes of…
Catharine Savage Brosman
January 15, 2025
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Bill Neal: A Culinary Genius of the South

It was in New Haven that I picked up a seminal Southern cookery book written by a young Southern chef working in Chapel Hill. His name was Bill Neal. On the dust jacket cover of the first edition that I bought, I see Bill Neal as a young happy man in his thirties. He is standing inside one of Chapel…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh
January 14, 2025
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The Bard of the South Carolina Low Country

Archibald Rutledge, a major South Carolina and national writer in the first half of the 20th century, seems to have dropped nearly out of sight.  His books are mostly available, when obtainable at all, in over-priced used remnants. Yet Rutledge was in his time  a celebrated and bestselling author of hunting and nature accounts, memoirs, and  a  poet of lasting…
Clyde Wilson
January 13, 2025
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Gettysburg

Under a copse of oaks, a mile or so from the ridge, we sit well hidden from the enemy. Yet at the moment, we’re less concerned about the Yanks than finding relief from the stifling heat. Hot, humid, and not a hint of a cloud in the sky. The woolen uniforms are no help either. Will stands up, and leans…
Fred Miller
January 10, 2025
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The South’s Forgotten Fire Eater

A review of The South's Forgotten Fire Eater: David Hubbard & North Alabama's Long Road to Disunion (New South Books, 2020) by Chris McIlwain Establishment historians typically portray Southern history as a cartoonish parade of superficial, racist, self-interested characters dedicated to the preservation of slavery. Every action by Southern political actors requires a discussion about how it relates to the…
Brion McClanahan
January 9, 2025
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Thomas Jefferson, Hugh Blair, and the Fine Art of Writing

As a writer of some accomplishment—over 70 published books and several hundred essays—my success in writing is due to my deep love of writing. Most of the scholars that I know have told me either that they find writing painful or at least unpleasant. That is not the case with me. There are times, and they are not infrequent despite…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 8, 2025
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Frances Fisher Tiernan: North Carolina’s Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell is for many Americans, especially Georgians, a household name.  Her Civil War epic holds a prominent place in the modern American literary and film halls of fame, and quotes from her novel still come out of the mouths of many Americans.  In contrast, one would be hard-pressed to find a bookshelf in any home or public library that…
J. Shaw Gillis
January 7, 2025
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A Slap in Jimmy Carter’s Face?

The Episcopal Church USA has long prided itself as hosting the venue for state occasions at its so-called National Cathedral in Washington D.C. The National Cathedral is a large building in the gothic style which was built over the course of decades with much fund-raising done by that denomination nation-wide. Begun in 1907, the Cathedral is actually dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, but…
David McCallister
January 6, 2025
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I Ain’t Apologizing

Jon Harris has been affiliated with the Abbeville Institute for nearly a decade. He was one of our Summer School students, has been responsible for some of our video work, and was the editor and producer of our 1607 Project documentary. He hosts the popular YouTube channel Conversations That Matter and published two books on social justice and Christianity. He…
Abbeville Institute
January 3, 2025
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The Danger Still Not Over

In October 1801, Virginia’s great revolutionary and jurist Edmund Pendleton addressed a public excited about the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency.  At eighty years old, this senior statesman offered thoughts on the election and the future of the United States.  Pendleton’s bona fides were well known: member of the Continental Congress, first speaker of Virginia’s House of Delegates,…
William J. Watkins
January 2, 2025
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Crossing the River With My RC

When I was a young boy, circa six or seven, there were no monstrous interstate highways slashing across the land. The land was beautiful, or as I probably thought, at the time, natural. Interstate highways are about as natural as was Sherman’s march through Georgia. They are federal (Yankee) spending, creating great slashes through private property (eminent domain is Grendel;…
Paul H. Yarbrough
January 1, 2025
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The New South and Future South

What does the Southern tradition have to offer America in 2025? Richard Weaver wrote in his Southern Tradition at Bay that the Old South may not be a place where we would want to live, but it certainly could offer examples of how to live. That’s a pregnant statement. Southerners, more than Americans in other sections, held fast to tradition…
Brion McClanahan
December 31, 2024
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The Sword Was Their Passport

While working on an essay about LSU Press, I came across a title I wanted to buy for my library. I searched for months—nothing. I finally made a two-hour roundtrip to a university library that lends books to locals. That’s where I found Harris Gaylord Warren’s The Sword Was Their Passport. Published in 1943 by Louisiana State University Press, Warren’s…
Chase Steely
December 30, 2024
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Another Example of Anti-Southern Judicial Activism

Earlier this month, a Federal District Court Judge in the Middle District of Georgia, Clay D. Land, ruled against the National Ranger Memorial Foundation in their lawsuit against Biden Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and others, regarding the brick paver honoring John Singleton Mosby at the Ranger Memorial at Fort Moore, formally known as Fort Benning, Georgia, that was targeted…
David McCallister
December 27, 2024
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Thomas Jefferson’s Christmas Eve Wish

On Christmas Eve 1786, a mawkish Thomas Jefferson pens a letter (below, in toto) to Maria Cosway, a lovely Italian painter and musician, married by convenience to the eccentric and monkeylike Richard Cosway—a foppish macaroni. Jefferson met the Cosways on August 6, 1786, when he and American artist John Trumbull met them by accident while Jefferson and Trumbull were admiring…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 26, 2024
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A Christmas Day in Charlotte

"A merry Christmas and a happy New Year!" These be immortal words. They suggest happy firesides and blazing logs; the joy of little children; the repeated handshake; the ready offering of charity; the deepening of love; and a sweeter showing of spiritual life. As the words are written, the voice of the cow bell and the tin horn and the…
Charles Henry Smith
December 25, 2024
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Moravian Star

In an effort to be unique, a new ubiquity has consumed Christmas decorations across the nation – inflatable snowmen glow in every front yard, multicolored neon lights clash dramatically at property lines, and Santa’s feet stick upright out of chimneys.  In stark defiance to this trend, the city of Winston-Salem, with its demure Christmas decorations, features prominently in Southern Living…
J. Shaw Gillis
December 24, 2024
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Marxism and the Cultural Revolution

It will not have escaped many people’s attention that one of the main strategies in America’s “reckoning on race and Southern identity” involves depicting the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of racial oppression. Against this, Patrick J. Buchanan argued that: What the flag symbolizes for the millions who revere, cherish, or love it, however, is the heroism of those…
Wanjiru Njoya
December 23, 2024
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Honorable and Brilliant Labors

A review of Honorable and Brilliant Labors, Orations of William Gilmore Simms (University of South Carolina Press, 2024), edited by John D. Miller Out of this 298 page book, 70% are Simms's orations with a small part of that the index, bibliography and an appendix that lists all of Simms's known orations. The 195 pages of Simms's work - his…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
December 20, 2024
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Jefferson on Secession: Pro and Con

Jefferson was always committed to the rights to revolt and to secede. They are of the gist of his Declaration of Independence and his sanction of bottom-up government. Republican government, he often says—especially in three singular letters in 1816—is government by the vox populi (lit., voice of the people). He writes to Samuel Kercheval (12 July 1816): Governments are republican…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 19, 2024
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The Southern Gentleman Who Dominated Chess

As the secession crisis intensified in the last years of the 1850s, the most famous Southerner known on the European continent was likely not Maryland-born Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, nor Mississippi senator and future president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, nor South Carolina poet and novelist William Gilmore Simms. Rather, that honor would almost certainly go to…
Casey Chalk
December 18, 2024
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The Last of the Romans

Philosophic in his temperament and wise in his conduct, governed in all his actions by reason and judgment, and deeply imbued with Bible images, this virtuous and patriotic man (whom Mr. Jefferson called "the last of the Romans") had long fixed the term of his political existence at the age which the Psalmist assigns for the limit of manly life:…
Thomas Hart Benton
December 17, 2024
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It’s a Daniel’s Clothing Christmas

We give gifts at Christmas because we were given a gift. My grandfather, John T. “Tyson” Daniel, opened Daniel’s Clothing in Tuskegee, Alabama on May 5, 1939. Originally, he moved to Tuskegee from Montgomery in 1931 at the age of 26 to open a Singer Sewing Machine store, and he was a door-to-door salesman in Tuskegee for the Singer Corporation.…
Tom Daniel
December 16, 2024
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The War as an International Strategic Conflict

When the discussion of the causes of the war is broadened from slavery to address tariffs, federalism, and several other issues they are still commonly looked at from the perspective of political philosophy in a domestic context but the American conflict existed in an international context with several external actors. England had both a trade policy at the time of…
James (Jim) Pederson
December 13, 2024
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Fear and Propaganda: The Jefferson-Hemings Myth

For 25 years, The Thomas Jefferson (Memorial) Foundation has been pushing the story of Jefferson’s involvement of Sally Hemings. In 2000, after conclusion of their analysis of the 1998 DNA study concerning Jefferson’s avowed paternity of Hemings’ children, their story was that it was very likely that Jefferson fathered all of Hemings’ children, but in 2018, the qualifiers were removed:…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 12, 2024
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Democratic Principles

How sweet are the sounds from home. How soothing the consolations of a discerning wife. I was feeling bad and she knew it. My cogitations over the election news were by no means jubilant. Silent and sad, with the newspaper open on my knee, I had been looking dreamily at the flickering flames for about ten minutes while Mrs. Arp…
Charles Henry Smith
December 10, 2024
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The Simple Life

'Tis an old question, revived by a letter that wondered why anybody could be content to stay in Charlotte or smaller places when New York, Boston and other larger cities offer so much more broadening influences and so much greater facilities for ambition. The letter came from a man who has lived in New York only a year or so…
Isaac Erwin Avery
December 9, 2024
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Local Signs and Wonders

A review of Local Signs and Wonders: Essays about Belonging to a Place (Mercer University Press, 2024) by Richard Rankin. Richard Rankin’s ancestral homestead, founded in the 1760’s, is located about twenty miles west of Charlotte, North Carolina. This book is an exploration of what could be called the two dimensions of stewardship: local and cosmic. Stewardship in the local…
Caryl Johnston
December 6, 2024
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Getting to Know Thomas Jefferson

As editor-in-Chief of the inaugural issue of the now-defunct theme-based journal, The Journal of Thomas Jefferson’s Life and Times, I was asked to write the feature, introductory essay, which I titled “‘A silent execution of duty’: The Republican Pen of Thomas Jefferson.” It was a daunting task, as I aimed to introduce the journal by constructing an essay that would…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 5, 2024
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Country Music in the 20th Century

A review of Southern Story and Song: Country Music in the 20th Century (Shotwell, 2024) by Joseph R. Stromberg Readers who have enjoyed the articles posted here at Abbeville by Joseph R. Stromberg will be as excited as I was to learn he’d written a book about country music. This excellent book explores the rich cultural tapestry of Southern music,…
Tom Daniel
December 2, 2024
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Love Thanksgiving? Thank Virginia

When most Americans think of the “First Thanksgiving,” they think of the Pilgrims in Plymouth who sat down for a Harvest Festival meal with the Wampanoag Indians in 1621. The Pilgrims had arrived on the Mayflower in November of 1620 and nearly a year later celebrated the abundance of provisions that God had provided. The Thanksgiving tradition recalls to memory…
Sean McGowan
November 28, 2024
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Erasing Black Confederates

This piece was originally published at Mises.org In 2019 The New York Times launched their 1619 project, which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” In the NYT retelling of American history, black troops who fought for the Union in the…
Wanjiru Njoya
November 27, 2024
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Pro Aris Et Focis

A review of The Gentler Gamester (Green Altar Books, 2024) by James Everett Kibler THE GENTLER GAMESTER  holds a unique position in the literary corpus of Dr. James Everett Kibler, Jr. This is not simply due to the fact that the story is set in the Carolina Lowcountry and that it introduces his longtime readers to an entirely new cast…
Patrick Seay
November 26, 2024
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The 2024 Election and the Southern Tradition: the Big Picture

The central issue of the 2024 election was the question, what is democracy?  The Democrats in particular claimed that they were the defenders of “democracy.”  They were sincere, although to their opponents this claim seemed the epitome of gaslighting.  Their view is that democracy is top-down, whereby elite institutions (e.g., universities, foundations, the science establishment, big business, the media, government…
Mike Goodloe
November 25, 2024
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That’s What I Like About the South

In 2018, the Abbeville Institute hosted a Summer School on Southern music. I gave a talk titled “That’s What I Like About the South” based on the song written by Andy Razaf and made famous by Phil Harris in the 1940s. Much has changed in eighty years, but the things that Harris and Razaf “liked about the South” have not:…
Brion McClanahan
November 22, 2024
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Summertime and the Livin’ Is Easy

Originally published in Southern Partisan in 1979. Some forty years ago, H. L. Mencken and one of his cronies set out to study the “level of civilization” in each of the (at that time) forty-eight states. They put together a variety of quantitative indicators of health, wealth, literacy, governmental performance, and so on, and triumphantly announced in the American Mercury…
John Shelton Reed
November 21, 2024
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While Hegel Smiles in His Grave: A Colorful Explanation of Jefferson’s Racism

A review of Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition (University of Virginia Press, 2024) by Hannah Spahn Following philosopher Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment, says Hannah Spahn, can be summed by the formula sapere aude (“dare to know”), Spahn focuses on two figures she takes to be representative of that climate: black “poet” Phillis Wheatley…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 19, 2024
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Reinvigorating State Power in the US Senate

Donald Trump’s victory in the election for the federal presidency has provoked bold claims of a sweeping political realignment in the States: ‘The recent political landscape has been shaken to its core, revealing a seismic shift that has emerged as a result of the latest elections. The transformative power of the MAGA movement has taken center stage, with an unprecedented…
Walt Garlington
November 18, 2024
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The Frescos of North Carolina

In 2022, I was driving through Wilkesboro, NC and saw a brown DOT sign that said something along the lines of “St. Paul’s Church Frescos.”  The word “frescos” caught my eye as I tend to associate frescos with Italy, not small towns in western NC.  Some of the most famous works of art in the world are frescos such as…
J. Shaw Gillis
November 14, 2024
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The Apotheosis of Abraham Lincoln

“Abraham Lincoln…has almost disappeared from human knowledge. I hear of him, I read of him in eulogies and biographies, but I fail to recognize the man I knew in life.”--Union General Donn Piatt You have to give credit to those who fought to prevent Southern Independence. Post-war, they seized the narrative, stated they were going to “reeducate” Southerners and created…
John M. Taylor
November 13, 2024
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Rebuilding the Christian and Southern Traditions for Posterity

Trump’s historic election victory was a clear mandate from the American people to stop the insanity that has been the political Left. However, it is much more than reversing inflation, strengthening borders, and not being woke. The next four years, and Lord-willing, beyond are an opportunity to redefine the trajectory of the country and use the time given to us…
Cole Branham
November 12, 2024
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A Knotty Nodus

I have ever championed the view that the hallmark of good history or philosophy, especially for young scholars, is for a scholar to take what might be considered as a small problem or topic, perhaps one typically overpassed by others (e.g., Jefferson and guns), and do a thorough job of it. In that way, whoever wishes to write on that…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 8, 2024
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Donald Trump on Lee and “Reconciliation”

Editor's note: Trump issued this statement on the removal of the Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia on September 8, 2021. He has publicly supported reversing the work of the "Naming Commission", has offered a real reconciliationist assessment of the War and Reconstruction, and could, by executive order, mandate that the Arlington Confederate Monument be restored to its original position.  Just…
Donald J. Trump
November 7, 2024
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A New View of Reconstruction

A Review of Reconstruction: Destroying a Republic and Creating an Empire by James Ronald Kennedy (Shotwell Publishing, 2024 Since they wrote The South Was Right, the Kennedy twins have become legendary in the field of Southern history, and this latest effort by Ron Kennedy does not disappoint. He begins by quoting Marxist historian James S. Allen, who wrote: “Reconstruction was…
Samuel W. Mitcham
November 5, 2024
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Lessons from Reconstruction

Originally published at Mises.org. In “The Terror of Reconstruction,” Lew Rockwell highlights the dangers of governments seeking to suppress their political opponents by an assault on citizens’ liberties. He draws upon the experience of the South under military dictatorship during the Reconstruction years as an example of what happens when governments embark on social revolution. One tactic described by Rockwell…
Wanjiru Njoya
November 4, 2024
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Secession and Reconciliation

Modern activist historians think "reconciliation" is a pejorative, but for most Americans in the early 20th century, it was a necessary part of healing. This included histories written by Southerners. We discuss one of those books on this episode of The Essential Southern Podcast. https://youtu.be/ZMkmCr8u7V8
Abbeville Institute
November 1, 2024
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Conservatism? We’ll See

“The American Conservative” founders: Scott McConnell, Patrick J. Buchanan, and Taki Theodoracopulos Back in the “dark ages” I was one of the early subscribers to TAC, probably for most of the reasons that these founders had raised a flag which waved a more truthful and accurate flag of conservatism. That is, to say, in part, that once-upon-a-time, flag wavers of…
Paul H. Yarbrough
October 31, 2024
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Thomas Jefferson Speaks Loudly From His Grave

Thomas Jefferson did not share fully his religious views with anyone, though one can tease out them from various writings to intimate friends. As I have shown in The Surprisingly Simple Religious Views of Thomas Jefferson, his religion was naturalized and equivalent to the most basic ethical precepts: (1) Love and adore God and (2) love others. He was not…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 30, 2024
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The Comical Tragedy of “Kumbaya”

In the Low Country of South Carolina and the coastal regions of Georgia, the Gullah people are everywhere because they never left. Although there were significant numbers of Gullah who migrated out of the South at the turn of the 20th Century, the multitudes who stayed replaced them quickly and remained isolated. Their customs, dress, arts, language, and music still…
Tom Daniel
October 29, 2024
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The Sovietization of Federal Elections

Traditional community life is nearly non-existent in the modern United States, the natural effect of the venomous ideologies that have been imbibed in copious quantities over the decades by both Left and Right, progressives and conservatives.  Voting days are one of the few remaining vestiges of those earlier times, one of the few communal gatherings left to us – when…
Walt Garlington
October 28, 2024
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Secession and Its Doctrine

Excerpt from The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History by Hilary Abner Herbert, 1912. PREFATORY NOTE BY JAMES FORD RHODES “Livy extolled Pompey in such a panegyric that Augustus called him Pompeian, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship.” That we find in Tacitus. We may therefore picture to ourselves Augustus reading Livy’s “History…
Hilary Abner Herbert
October 25, 2024
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Al Smith and the “Facts” of American History

Alfred Emanuel Smith was an American politician who served four terms as Governor of New York and was the Democratic Party’s candidate for president in 1928. The following unknowingly prophetic speech was delivered to The American Liberty League Dinner in Washington, D. C on January 25th, 1936. A short biography of the man is attached at the end of this…
Valerie Protopapas
October 24, 2024
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Thomas Jefferson’s Ambivalence Concerning the Physic of His Day

This essay is dedicated to Dr. White McKenzie “Ken” Wallenborn, a cherished friend, dedicated unflinchingly to honesty concerning the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson. “Dr. Ken” passed on October 1, 2024. He was 95 years of age. Upon graduation from UVA’s medical school in 1955, Dr. Ken was called to active duty in the Air Force and he served…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 23, 2024
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A Rare [Southern] Bird

“The cabin was quiet..people were in prayer.” –Artimus Pyle On May 30, 1976, along with Aerosmith, Nazareth and Ted Nugent, Lynyrd Skynyrd played for a very large crowd at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C.  My brother Kenny was there and 48 years later still has his ticket stub, a collector’s item now.  In those days, there was a great divide…
J.L. Bennett
October 22, 2024
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Calhoun and “Liberum Veto”

John C. Calhoun was a brilliant political theorist and distinguished politician, and a noted champion of rights for minorities. The importance of his thoughts is reflected both in the doctrine of states' rights, as well as in relation to the federal system which serves as a textbook example of effective state management. Calhoun was also one of the first to…
Karol Mazur
October 21, 2024
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Jefferson on Liberty and Truth

The Enlightenment was an epoch of unbridled optimism—a break from centuries of often blind reliancy on authority, and the sources of authority were generally the Bible and the works of Aristotle. With the shift to understanding the universe through empirical investigation of it (Gr., empeiria = experience), reliancy on authority weakened. Science—in the sense of strict observation of the world,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 15, 2024
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Vision of Order

A review of Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1995), by Richard Weaver  Richard M. Weaver was one of the South’s finest thinkers. His Visions of Order was first published posthumously in 1964, and later republished in 1995. This edition has an excellent preface by Ted Smith III, who asks “how much relevance a…
Caryl Johnston
October 14, 2024
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The Confederate Constitution of 1861

The Confederate Constitution of 1861 is a misunderstood document that made improvements on the United States Constitution. What were they? Professors Donald Livingston and Marshall DeRosa discuss the Constitution and its currency in modern America. https://youtu.be/9TSGgOIiyPE
Abbeville Institute
October 11, 2024
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Jefferson’s Political Philosophy Critiqued

A Review of Garrett Ward Sheldon’s The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Johns Hopkins, 1993) by Garret Ward Sheldon In his preface to The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, political theorist Garrett Ward Sheldon articulates a modest, but significant aim for beginning his book, and he does so economically: in one paragraph. Sheldon takes seriously the notion of Jefferson as…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 10, 2024
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More than Politics

What should we make of the exodus of millions of Americans from blue states to red ones, primarily in the South? In 2021, North American Van Lines reported that the Carolinas, Tennessee, Florida, Arizona, and Texas were the top destinations for movers, and the top five states for departures were Illinois, California, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York. Is this…
Casey Chalk
October 9, 2024
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True Reconciliation

In response to an article about the Southern holocaust that occurred during the so-called “Civil War,” I wish to bring forth testimony from a Southern hero who was shunned by the South—or most of it—after he went with Grant in 1872 and Hayes in 1876, finally becoming a member of the Republican Party in that year. Previously, Col. John Singleton…
Valerie Protopapas
October 8, 2024
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I’ll Take My Stand

Thomas H. Landess walked among Giants. He wrote and talked about them too. It was April of 1968, and he had gathered a few at the University of Dallas for a reunion under the banner of the Southern Literary Festival. It was a reunion of the surviving Southern Agrarians—Andrew Lytle, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren—Lyle Lanier…
Chase Steely
October 7, 2024
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Country People and Country Party

A review of Continuities: The South in a Time of Revolution (Shotwell Publishing, 2022) by John Devanny Dr. John Devanny writes from within an outlook quite unknown to most of today’s Americans. His focus is on the South’s origins and history, its variety and complexity, and its differences from its historical antagonists headquartered in New England. As the preface by…
Joseph R. Stromberg
October 4, 2024
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Centralizing Federal Power Through Southern Reconstruction

Originally published at Mises.org. Many historians have commented on the extent to which Abraham Lincoln centralized federal power in the course of his war against the South. Less often remarked upon is the fact that this trend continued during the Reconstruction era, 1865 to 1877. In his essay “Wichita Justice? On Denationalizing the Courts,” Murray Rothbard observes that the Reconstruction…
Wanjiru Njoya
October 2, 2024
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George III and the Revolution

In Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), Jefferson writes of King George III’s unwillingness to use his “negative” to abort unjust proposals. Jefferson again writes similarly is in his first draft of Declaration of Independence, two years later. Jefferson here lists a “long train of abuses & usurpations,” at the hand of King George III. Those, he…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 1, 2024
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Coming of the War Between the States: An Interpretation

When Lee surrendered at Appomattox a tall gaunt North Carolinian stolidly stacked arms and fell back into line. He was worn, hungry, and dirty. The insistent Yankees had granted him little time during the past weeks for relaxation. Food had been scarce; the opportunities for cleanliness lacking. He had gone on fighting more from habit than purpose. He had quit…
Avery O. Craven
September 30, 2024
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Keystones and Linchpins

Everyone understands the concept of the keystone and the linchpin. Even those who do not comprehend why these objects are of supreme importance, understand that, in fact, they are. For if one destroys the keystone, the arch dependent upon it will fall and if one removes the linchpin, the apparatus it binds together comes apart. There are keystones and linchpins…
Valerie Protopapas
September 27, 2024
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The Battle of the Confederate Monuments

This essay was originally published at Mises.org. Various justifications have been advanced by those removing or destroying Confederate monuments to explain why they deem it necessary to dismantle the Confederate heritage. For example, the memorial to Zebulon Vance in Asheville, North Carolina was demolished on grounds that it was “a painful symbol of racism.” In the tumult surrounding the Black Lives Matter riots, “168…
Wanjiru Njoya
September 26, 2024
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Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture

Sam Bowers Hilliard understood power—not the kind that flows from political office or great wealth, but the power of the land itself. Born in 1930, in a Georgia hamlet that bore his mother's maiden name, Hilliard grew to recognize how the soil, the crops, and the very food on Southern tables shaped the course of history. Hilliard joined the Department…
Chase Steely
September 24, 2024
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Jefferson’s Greatest Legacy

It is well-known today that Thomas Jefferson considered his Declaration of Independence, his Bill for Religious Freedom, and his University of Virginia to be his greatest contributions to humanity. That is why he had those deeds inscribed proudly on his tombstone. Yet perhaps his greatest legacy, mostly flouted today because of scholarly indifference to the large moral dimension of his…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 23, 2024
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Reconstruction

Reconstruction is one of the most important topics in American history. It used to be a complex story, and as one historian called it a "tragic era." Historians now call it an "unfinished revolution." What changed? Only interpretation. https://youtu.be/KRbQjvano1s
Abbeville Institute
September 20, 2024
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John Rutledge

John Rutledge was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in September, 1739. His father, Dr. John Rutledge, was a native of Ireland, who emigrated to South Carolina in 1735. He married Sarah Hext, a lady of liberal endowments and cultivation, who became the mother of the future jurist in the fifteenth year of her age. She was left a widow at…
William Horatio Barnes
September 18, 2024
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From the Archive–Hooray for the Confederate Flag

The Rev. Al Sharpton is a darling of the national news media, primarily because he has a talent for making outrageous statements and the lack of scruples to go with it. You should keep this in mind. In today's media-saturated world, nobody can be a successful demagogue without the cooperation of the national news media. Sharpton has even outdone Jesse…
Charley Reese
September 17, 2024
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Why Maryland Did Not Secede

After Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers on April 15, 1861, to force the seven cotton states back into the Union, four Upper South states—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—seceded and joined the Confederacy. They deemed Federal coercion against any state to be an unconstitutional abuse of power. Maryland’s experience underscores the point. The first fatality of the Civil War was…
Philip Leigh
September 16, 2024
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Jefferson and Kosciuszko

He is as pure a son of liberty, as I have ever known, and of that liberty which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone – Thomas Jefferson Modern scholars consider the friendship expressed in the letters exchanged between Tadeusz Kościuszko and Thomas Jefferson as one of the main historical sources on the…
Karol Mazur
September 13, 2024
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The Old South and the New South

Brion McClanahan discusses the continuity between the Old South and the New South and the Jeffersonian understanding of the War for Southern Independence at the October 2015 Conference in Stone Mountain, GA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYzD2vhNE3c
Brion McClanahan
September 12, 2024
Blog

From the Archives: James Iredell: Neglected Southern Federalist

Born in Lewes, England (October 5, 1751), Iredell spent his childhood in Bristol. The eldest of five sons born to Francis and Margaret McCulloh Iredell, he was forced to leave school after his father suffered a debilitating stroke in 1766. With the assistance of relatives, Iredell came to America in 1768 to accept an appointment as Comptroller of the Customs…
H. Lee Cheek, Jr.
September 11, 2024
Blog

“The Whole Affair Has Been Conducted by Amateurs”

In the November 5, 1998, piece for Nature, a group of scientists, led by pathologist Dr. Eugene Foster, had published a piece titled “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.” Utilizing what was at the time state-of-the-art Y-chromosome DNA analysis—the Y-chromosome is identical in a particular line of males (e.g., Jefferson’s Y-chromosome is the same as this father’s, his grandfather’s, his brother’s,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 10, 2024
Blog

Neo-Abolitionist Hypocrisy

Many modern Americans believe that slavery was a national unpardonable sin and that slaveholders were evil people unworthy of any respect or admiration. No one escapes this denunciation, including the Founding Fathers. They will give innumerable reasons why slavery was morally wrong, and while modern Western Civilization has generally accepted slavery as a morally reprehensible institution, judging historical actors by…
Jeff Wolverton
September 9, 2024
Blog

The Battle of Secessionville

My Talk at the 129th Annual Reunion of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Charleston, South Carolina, July 16, 2024 Good evening and WELCOME to God's Holy City of Charleston, South Carolina, where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers come together to FORM the Atlantic Ocean! It's also where the FIRST Ordinance of Secession passed 169 - 0 on December 20,…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
September 6, 2024
Blog

Jefferson v. Adams on “The Natural Aristocracy”

After a lengthy respite due to tensions between the two that began during Adams’ presidency, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, with the intervention of Benjamin Rush, resumed their correspondence with a brief letter from Adams to Jefferson on January 1, 1812. On June 15, 1813, Jefferson aims to clear the air, as it were. He brings up partisan differences concerning…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 5, 2024
Blog

The War Against the South

Originally published at LewRockwell.com In the past few decades, the federal government has been engaged in a concerted effort to destroy the heritage of the South, and this effort has intensified under so-called “President” Joe Biden and his gang of neo-con controllers. We can be sure that if Kamala Harris takes office as his successor, these efforts will continue. After…
Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.
September 4, 2024
Blog

Too Many Skunks

I hate to take it out on Donald Trump. Whoever or whatever he is, he has spent a lot of time and money when he didn’t have to. He did most likely earn his money, unlike many of the disgusting and vile yard-dog Democrats, such as the Clintons, Obamas, Willie Brown, Pelosis, and of course there is the Biden Ukraine…
Paul H. Yarbrough
September 3, 2024
Blog

Muslim Slavery

The following remarks were delivered at the fourth annual Jefferson Davis Conference at Mount Crawford, Virginia on June 27, 2024. When we hear about slavery, what do we hear about it? We hear that it was invented by white people when they enslaved black people. Actually, slavery has been in the world since the beginning of recorded history. Historian John…
Timothy A. Duskin
September 2, 2024
Blog

Robert E. Lee: The Marble [Christian] Man

Originally published at Truthscript.com On 7 August 2024, the Witherspoon Institute’s journal, Public Discourse, published an article by John F. Doherty entitled: “Propriety without Principle: The Cautionary Tale of Robert E. Lee.” Citing Allen C. Guelzo’s 2021 biography of Lee as his source of information, Doherty paints Robert E. Lee as an irreligious hypocrite of weak moral fiber whose virtues were apparent rather than…
Earl Starbuck
August 29, 2024
Blog

How Sally is Saving Monticello

Recently, I watched the Abbeville Institute’s Zoom conversation with Mike Kitchens on the loss of historic antebellum homes. Many have been lost to demolition or neglect.  But there is another kind of loss threatening these historic sites. While it is important to discuss the people who built and kept these plantations afloat, some house museums are focusing disproportionately on the…
Celia Jones Prehn
August 28, 2024
Blog

The Honest Zealot Versus the Troublesome Ideologue

A Critique of Thomas Fleming’s The Great Divide: The Conflict between Washington and Jefferson that Defined a Nation A book about the conflict between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson is overdue, says Thomas Fleming. “Numerous historians have explored Jefferson’s clash with Alexander Hamilton. But little has been written about the differences that developed between the two most famous founding fathers”…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 27, 2024
Blog

Justice Chase and the Davis Treason Case

In May 1860 former Ohio Governor Salmon P. Chase was a leading contender for the presidential nomination at the Republican Party’s convention. Although Abraham Lincoln won it, he would appoint Chase his Treasury Secretary in March 1861. Chase would also make two more attempts at the presidency, one as a Republican in 1864 and a second as a Democrat in…
Philip Leigh
August 26, 2024
Blog

Sally Cary, Fairfax Harrison, and F.F.V. Pedigrees

I grab my trusty pocket knife, make short work of the tape, and open the box. Inside is a book, but not one I ordered. It’s a gift, courtesy of my friend Percy Gryce, a bookman’s bookman. The Book Sally Cary: A Long Hidden Romance of Washington's Life by Wilson Miles Cary (1838-1914). Its format or size is common. Octavo…
Chase Steely
August 23, 2024
Blog

Ghosts of Grandeur

Historic Southern antebellum homes are disappearing, and those that still remain are being reinterpreted by activist historians. Author Mike Kitchens joins us to talk about his book "Ghosts of Grandeur" and the current woke assault on Southern home museums and historic sites. https://youtu.be/7WE9RdCkFY8
Abbeville Institute
August 21, 2024
Blog

Thomas Jefferson on Educating Republican Citizens

After publishing my book, Thomas Jefferson: Uncovering His Unique Philosophy and Vision (2014)—which had three chapters each on Jefferson’s political philosophy, his moral thinking, and his philosophy of education—I realized that I had far from exhausted what could be said on each of the subjects. Thus, I began the first of a trilogy of books on the philosophy of Thomas…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 20, 2024
Blog

Thoughts Among Ruins

This, Warren, is our trouble now: Not even fools could disavow Three centuries of piety Grown bare as a cottonwood tree (A timber seldom drawn and sawn And chiefly used to hang men on), So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age. -Allen Tate It is on the hunt where the martial prowess is sharpened, where…
Thomas Ellen
August 19, 2024
Blog

From the Archives–Is America Too Big?

In 2010, the Abbeville Institute asked the question, "Is America Too Big?" This project was intended to be a multi-part series that pondered the future of the United States. Due to funding, we were only able to produce Part I, shown below, but we were ahead of the curve on the issue. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCNd7h0fsdE  
Abbeville Institute
August 16, 2024
Blog

Pawleys Island

My maternal grandmother grew up on a South Carolina beach and has passed her love of the beach on to her grandchildren. Ever since I can remember, my family has spent a week on Pawleys Island in South Carolina. We would fly from Arizona to spend two or more months between our grandparents’ home in Virginia, Pawleys Island in South…
Vaugh Sullivan
August 14, 2024
Blog

Jefferson’s Summary View as a Political Document with a Strong Southern Flair

In a 2022 essay for Abbeville, “Jefferson’s Textured Republicanism,” I examine letters by Jefferson on the differences between Federalists and Republicans. Jefferson argues that there is a constitutional (physical) difference between Federalists (Tories) and Republicans (Whigs), which manifests itself in polar political sentiments. Republicans and Whigs are Saxon-sympathizers; Federalists and Tories, Norman-sympathizers. In a letter from Jefferson to Marquis de…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 13, 2024
Blog

Was Jefferson Davis a Traitor?

While many Civil War students argue that Jefferson Davis was a traitor, he was never convicted of the crime because Federal prosecutors dropped the case. Specifically, in February 1869 Attorney General William Evarts notified Davis’s counsel that all prosecutors were told to apply nolle prosequi to all his indictments. To be sure, after Lincoln’s April 15, 1865, assassination many Northerners…
Philip Leigh
August 12, 2024
Blog

The Nature of the Union: A Response to Mark Pulliam

This piece was originally published at the Independent Institute. Mark Pulliam is a good fellow. He is retired from big law and regularly writes for publications such as Chronicles and the Law and Liberty Blog. Pulliam often sends me links to his publications and 99 percent of the time, I love his material. I enjoy my correspondence with him. However,…
William J. Watkins
August 9, 2024
Blog

A Hill and a Holler

Some memories are a story just waiting to be told.  And memories of family make some of the best stories.  Some of my favorite memories revolve around travel, those family outings where we hit the not so dusty trails of Dixie.  Actually, many modern highways were the byways, the pioneer trails of yesteryear.  Our travel often included extended family, with…
Brett Moffatt
August 8, 2024
Blog

The Resistance of the South to Northern Radicalism

This piece was originally published in the New England Quarterly in 1935. In December 22, 1859, an extra train arrived at Richmond bringing over two hundred medical students from Philadelphia. It was the hegira of southern students from the North following the excitement of John Brown's raid. The faculty and students of the Richmond Medical College, the town council, and…
Clement Eaton
August 7, 2024
Blog

The Economic Aspects of the South as a Health and Pleasure Resort

Editor's Introduction: This short essay in The South and the Building of the Nation series highlights the spirit of reconciliation that most Americans embraced by the early twentieth century. Published in 1909, The South in the Building of the Nation offered native Southerners--almost all of whom possessed terminal degrees in their academic fields--a chance to offer a critical yet often…
Andrew Sledd
August 6, 2024
Blog

Oh, Say Can You Secede?

This piece was originally published at The Imaginative Conservative. A review of The Constitution of Non-State Government: Field Guide to Texas Secession (Shotwell, 2022) by T.L Hulsey “Secession,” writes Robert W. Merry in a recent essay for The American Conservative, “isn’t a word heard in today’s political discourse.” But, he notes, “an extensive poll of 35,307 Americans conducted earlier this…
David Deavel
August 5, 2024
Blog

From the Archives–What Secession Is

The Institute was founded in 2002 around a conference table at the University of Virginia. We held our first Summer School in 2003. Here, President Emeritus Donald Livingston discusses "What Secession Is" at this first summer event. It's a worthy topic in our current political climate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kZSU8NJIzY
Abbeville Institute
August 1, 2024
Blog

From the Archives–Livingston v. Guelzo

In September 2010, the University of Virginia hosted a debate between Abbeville Institute founder Don Livingston and Professor Allen Guelzo, recognized to be one of the foremost Lincolnian scholars in the United States, on the topic "Is Nullification Constitutional?" Guelzo is as committed to the Lincolnian position of an "indestructible Union" as Livingston is to the compact fact of the…
Abbeville Institute
July 30, 2024
Blog

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…
Brion McClanahan
July 29, 2024
Blog

Spencer Roane, Part 2

Continued from Part 1. When the Democrats came into power, the need of a Democratic paper was felt in Virginia. The newspaper had now become one of the most important methods of political warfare. Each party maintained one at Washington, in which articles advocating the one and maligning the other were published. These were read throughout the country, and in…
Abbeville Institute
July 26, 2024
Blog

Spencer Roane, Part 1

Written by Edwin J. Smith in 1905 and published in the John P. Branch Historical Papers of Randolph-Macon College. The formative period of our national existence is the one which, more than any other, produced great men. Great issues arose which had to be settled. Great battles were fought and won in the arena of public life-battles on which depended…
Abbeville Institute
July 25, 2024
Blog

How Liberal was Thomas Jefferson’s Liberalism?

Government, Thomas Jefferson all too frequently notes, is for the sake of the wellbeing of all citizens, each considered the political equal of all others and, in consequence, deserving of the same rights. Government, thus, exists for the sake of the wellbeing of all citizens, considered as individuals. Government, he often says, is of and for the people. That noted,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 24, 2024
Blog

My New Favorite Song

I have a new favorite song.  I discovered it during the promotional build-up to the annual football contest between two worthy academic institutions: The University of Michigan and The Ohio State University. I don’t know whether the song has a title, but it is sung to the tune of “ The Old Grey Mare” (she ain’t what she used to…
Arnie Sidman
July 23, 2024
Blog

Have We Learned Anything from the Destruction of Confederate Monuments?

On a bright September day in 2017, in my hometown of Dallas, Texas, a work crew removed a large, bronze statue from Lee Park. The sculpture depicted Robert E. Lee accompanied by a young soldier, each mounted on horseback, and had been unveiled eight decades earlier as part of the Texas Centennial. During that celebration marking 100 years of Texas…
Aaron Archer
July 22, 2024
Blog

The (Self)-Righteous Cause

It is common in Civil War circles to hear about the so-called “Lost Cause”, variously termed a myth or a narrative. Are those two terms synonymous? Let’s look. Dictionary.com defines myth as: “a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.” On the other hand, using…
John Scales
July 19, 2024
Blog

A Northerner by Birth, A Southerner by Choice

When speaking at Abbeville’s “The 1607 Project,” someone from the audience came to me, after my talk—and the Abbeville audience was electric!—and said, “You really mean what you say.” It was a curious sentiment, for by implication, I could conclude that many speakers at that or other conferences merely go about the business of public speaking without investing personally in…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 18, 2024
Blog

An Outrage Double Standard?

Donald Trump’s MAGA base (which includes many of the Southern people) is galvanized like never before after the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life.  Two things in particular have annealed them to the former president as it regards this traumatic incident:  the tough guy image of a man who ‘took a bullet for America’ and the vitriol of his opponents. But…
Walt Garlington
July 17, 2024
Blog

And He Shall Be Leevonne (And He Shall Be a Good Man)

Mr. Leevonne Mitchell was my teacher. I graduated from Auburn High School in 1978, and he was technically and officially my Speech teacher in 10th grade. But, man, he was SO much more than that… Recently, I was talking with some classmates about him, and we all realized that as much as we owed that man, we knew absolutely nothing…
Tom Daniel
July 16, 2024
Blog

“Providence” – Divine Intervention in the Life of George Washington

There is an old saying that rejects not only the concept of the “randomness” of history but of mankind’s involvement in that history. It identifies situations addressing external forces acting on human beings and in so doing influencing history itself. This maxim states that, “Man proposes but God disposes.” For there is overwhelming evidence of the existence of something other…
Valerie Protopapas
July 15, 2024
Blog

An Old Confederate Story of Irish Wit

From the Confederate Veteran, February, 1916: Tommy Logan was a typical son of the Emerald Isle, who entered the Confederate army at the first call for troops 11 tn Mississippi. He joined the company to which I belonged, which was formed of young planters, all or nearly all the sons of wealthy planters of Hinds and Madison Counties. Tommy was…
Abbeville Institute
July 11, 2024
Blog

A Man of the South

With Father’s Day 2024 come and gone, I have had the opportunity to consider the coincidence that occurred that weekend – namely my watching two superb westerns from different decades, Anthony Mann’s Man of the West from 1958 and Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales from 1976.  As a longtime aficionado of the western, I should, of course, have already…
Randall Ivey
July 10, 2024
Blog

Southern Poetic Wisdom

When little sister fell down the well, We retrieved her by pulley, rope, and bucket. She, bruised, wet, learned a lesson. Maybe. Doves fly over as hunters blast away; Nothing falls but droppings in one eye. ‘I can’t see Jack-squat, Billy Bob.’ Hook from my fly-cast catches the wife’s ear lobe, And screaming like a banshee, she falls out of…
Thomas Hubert
July 9, 2024
Blog

Invoking the Rule of Completeness on Independence Day

Political hucksters—both Left and Right—are dusting off copies of the Declaration of Independence in preparation for the July 4th observances.  At most, they are making sure to quote correctly the language of paragraph two which speaks of self-evident truths about liberty and equality. Seldom does a modern rhetorician even glance at the remainder of the document. On this Independence Day,…
William J. Watkins
July 4, 2024
Blog

John Tyler, Son of Virginia

From the Confederate Veteran, January 1916: John Tyler, distinguished Virginian and tenth President of the United States, has received fitting, though long-deferred, honor from the country he served. Fifty-three years after his death the United States government has erected a handsome monument at his last resting place, in the shades of beautiful Hollywood Cemetery, at Richmond, Va., that sacred and…
Abbeville Institute
July 3, 2024
Blog

The GOAT of Political Documents

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate & equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 2, 2024
Blog

40 Acres and a Lie?

It has evidently taken a hundred and sixty years for some people to realize that Abraham Lincoln's War was waged not for the slave but against his master, who had been the stumbling block for Northern ambitions for an unconstitutionally powerful central government ever since the days of Thomas Jefferson. With the election of Lincoln and his strictly sectional Northern…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
July 1, 2024
BlogPodcast

Arlington Reconciliation

Ep. 13: How did Americans think about the Arlington Confederate or Reconciliation monument in 1914? They clearly told you, and it isn't what the woke cancel culture folks want you to believe. https://youtu.be/UGPyhKLXIY8
Brion McClanahan
June 29, 2024
Blog

20th Century American Historians

Dr. Clyde N. Wilson is known to many through his association with the Abbeville Institute and his long tenure as editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun. Some might have read Why the South Will Survive: Fifteen Southerners Look at Their Region a Half Century after I'll Take My Stand. The well-versed have likely read his Southern Readers Guide…
Chase Steely
June 28, 2024
Blog

Jefferson and the Four Faces of Liberty

Precisely what Jefferson means by “liberty” is a matter of considerable debate among scholars. Merrill Peterson in “Thomas Jefferson and the National Purpose” says that liberty for Jefferson was a code of restraint on sovereignty, exercised by a few or many. Thus, liberty involved minifying and decentralizing government. “He was the first to see that strength, the progress, even the…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 27, 2024
Blog

The Sabbath and the Slaves

Perhaps no topic of importance in the Old South may be handled rightly without dealing with the Peculiar Institution: slavery. The Christian Sabbath, or the Lord’s day – often referred to by Christians in the nineteenth century simply as the Sabbath – was no exception. Embedded in the Ten Commandments, the fourth commandment (according to Protestant enumeration) – to remember…
Forrest L. Marion
June 26, 2024
1607 ProjectBlogMedia Posts

Virginia First: The 1607 Project

Over the past five years, historians, journalists, and political activists have crafted seemingly conflicting narratives about the American founding. They are "seemingly conflicting" because all three center on the "proposition nation myth" of American history. According to this account, the United States was founded on the idea that all men (and women) were created equal. The "idea of equality" forms…
Brion McClanahan
June 24, 2024
Blog

The Unbroken Line of New England Radicalism

Prof. David Hackett Fischer gives an overview of the chief characteristics of New England’s ancestors, who hailed from the coastal southeastern counties of England, mainly East Anglia and Essex, in his praiseworthy book, Albion’s Seed.  Among them were an inclination toward industrial pursuits, urban living, equality, and rebelliousness against established authorities in religion and politics (Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways…
Walt Garlington
June 21, 2024
Blog

Davis vs. Lincoln

If any further evidence had been required to show that it was the determination of the Northern people not only to make no concessions to the grievances of the Southern States, but to increase them to the last extremity, it was furnished by the proclamation of President Lincoln, issued on April 15, 1861. This proclamation, which has already been mentioned,…
Jefferson Davis
June 20, 2024
Blog

A Meeting of Southern Writers

This essay by Donald Davidson was originally published in The Bookman in 1932. The footnotes and links are my contributions. Such essays are maps. In reports appearing soon after the event, the gathering of Southern writers held in late October under the auspices of the University of Virginia was variously denominated “house party,” “conference,” “convocation,” or—with even greater reserve—“occasion.” Such…
Chase Steely
June 18, 2024
Blog

Another Book about White Privilege at a Southern Plantation

A review of The Jeffersons at Shadwell (Yale University Press, 2010) by Susan Kern The first question that demands an answer in reviewing a book is this: Why is this book needed? Without straightforwardly answering that question, Susan Kern in The Jeffersons at Shadwell at least implicitly answers that question by allowing discerning readers to craft, through reading her book,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 17, 2024
Blog

Mr. Trump and the Old Dominion

Recent polls conducted by Roanoke College and Morning Consult show Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump in a dead heat in the presidential race in Virginia. Mr. Trump lost Virginia to Hilary Clinton by five percentage points, a bit more than 200,00 votes, and was buried under a Biden landslide in the state by a margin of over nine percentage points…
John Devanny
June 14, 2024
Blog

Southern Sacrifice

In Vietnam, 13,262 Southerners in the US Army died. On a per capita basis this is 12% more than the rest of the country. In other words, Southerners were 31% of the total US population and accounted for 36% of the Army deaths in Vietnam. A similar story is true for Korea. Southerners accounted for 35% of the deaths in…
Garrick Sapp
June 13, 2024
Blog

The 19th Century Ecclesiastical Debate Over Slavery – Part 3

Ecclesiastical organizations, both North and South, had by the early 19th century developed sensitivities uncomfortable with the institution of slavery. This discomfort was sourced in common Enlightenment ideals regarding liberty and natural law but took on sectional distinctions which led to conflict. An ideological fervor swept the North which influenced a radicalism that played loosely with any consideration of traditional…
Rod O'Barr
June 12, 2024
Blog

Thomas Jefferson and the Other (Black) Patrick Henry

Thomas Jefferson bought the 57-acre tract of land including the Natural Bridge of Virginia in 1774—the year he produced his vitriolic Summary View of the Rights of British America—for a pittance. Except for the bridge, which Jefferson considered to be one of the natural wonders of the world, a mirabile visu, the land around the bridge was not much arable…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 11, 2024
Blog

When Lincoln Changed the War’s Pretext from “A Question Upon Slavery”

State Dept. Documents Prove Abolition Neither the Aim Nor the Cause of the Conflict On April 1, 1861, Secretary of State William H. Seward sent President Abraham Lincoln a memorandum entitled “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration.” “My system is built upon this idea as a ruling one,” Seward wrote, “namely that we must Change the question before the Public…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
June 10, 2024
Blog

Jefferson on Gentlemanly Farming

In The Gentleman Farmer, Being an Attempt to Improve Agriculture, By Subjecting It to the Test of Rational Principles, Lord Kames (Henry Home) distinguishes between the practice and the theory of farming. The former, which concerns only effects, is rightly a branch of Natural History. The latter, which concerns causes, is rightly a branch of Natural Philosophy. Most writers treat…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 7, 2024
Blog

The South and World War II

Being Southern is a good thing. People around the world have long recognised that. Those who love the South must present a POSITIVE front, celebrate the South, and avoid being simply AGAINST. Nothing can be more irrelevant and counter-productive to the cause of the South than to get wrapped up in ideologies from the ugly history of central and eastern…
Clyde Wilson
June 6, 2024
Blog

Polish Confederates and the Principle “For Our Freedom and Yours”

The history of Poles' participation in the formation of the American Republic, especially participation in the American War of Independence, has been perfectly documented by Polish and non-Polish researchers. For example, there are extensive biographies of Tadeusz Kosciusko and Casimir Pulaski. Unfortunately the contribution of Poles in the period of the Civil War still remains a topic for broader discussion,…
Karol Mazur
June 4, 2024
Blog

In Memoriam: Jefferson Davis

To those who were not actors in the events of the period from 1860 to 1865, it is almost impossible to present a complete and vivid picture of the revolution by States which was practically inaugurated by the action of the convention of the people of South Carolina, on December 20, 1860. So much has been done by the war,…
Theodore Gaillard Barker
June 3, 2024
Blog

The 19th Century Ecclesiastical Debate Over Slavery – Part 2

When we dichotomize the 19th century ecclesiastical debate as “Southern “pro-slavery” and Northern “anti-slavery,” it must first be pointed out that these two titles are heavily nuanced in meaning. They did not mean that a virtuous North was committed to the welfare of blacks while an evil South delighted in their human bondage. Neither side believed that slavery abstractly considered…
Rod O'Barr
May 31, 2024
Blog

African-American Slavery in Historical Perspective

A review of African American Slavery in Historical Perspective (Shotwell Publishing, 2024) by Clyde N. Wilson This is an extremely important book because putting slavery in historical perspective puts the lie to the worthless presentist history regurgitated ad nauseam by academia and the fake news media. You can not learn from history when the history being taught is a fraud.…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
May 30, 2024
Blog

Confederates Weren’t Traitors

Professor Williams’ argument (“Naming Commission Historian Rationalizes Name Changes in Campus Talk,” news, May 14) that the Confederate soldier is odious because he committed treason when killing Union soldiers collapses at its premise. He was not a traitor. First, almost 300 officers left the Federal Army during the secession crisis and 270 joined the Confederacy. None were charged with treason. Second,…
Philip Leigh
May 29, 2024
Blog

Jefferson v. Hamilton: A Northern versus Southern Feud?

As one enters Monticello, one is greeted by a bust of Jefferson facing a bust of Alexander Hamilton—“opposed in death as in life”—both by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi. The statue of Hamilton is life-size, while the statue of Jefferson is a bit larger, and that suggests not merely Jefferson’s opposition, but political victory over Hamilton. What were the reasons for…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 28, 2024
Blog

Dirty Work and Decoration Day

In 1853, a newly elected, twenty-six year old State representative stood to defend his "Negro Exclusion" bill against bitter attacks by anti-slavery legislators in his State. He made this a centerpiece of his campaign in 1852, railed against "Negro equality" and supported the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The bill found support from the majority of the people of his State,…
Brion McClanahan
May 27, 2024
Blog

The Lincolns in the White House

A review of The Lincolns in the White House (Pangaeus Press, 2023) by Kevin Orlin Johnson Kevin Orlin Johnson is a brilliant researcher who has doggedly pursued original source material for the truth about Abraham Lincoln. And it doesn’t matter how many libraries he has to visit and how many un-indexed collections of papers written with quill pens he has…
John Avery Emison
May 24, 2024
Blog

Forrest

The officer of regular troops intrusted with the duty of quickly raising levies for immediate war service is often too prone to think that his one great endeavor should be to “set them up” and so instruct them in drill as to make them look as much 1ike regulars as possible. As a matter of fact, he almost invariably fails…
Garnet Wolseley
May 23, 2024
Blog

Lynchburg’s Noiseless Musical Genius

Julia Winston Ivey, on September 15, 2020, quietly passed away at her house on Parkland Drive in Lynchburg, Virginia. She was a remarkable musical talent, an internationally lauded pianist in her prime years, yet her death created only a small stir in Hill City and her funeral, at her gravesite, was sparsely attended. The irony of her hushed passing is…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 22, 2024
Blog

The 19th Century Ecclesiastical Debate Over Slavery – Part One

It is almost impossible for 21st century Christians, much less deeply biased contemporary historians, to comprehend that nineteenth century Southerners could, with any sincerity or justification, defend the compatibility of Christianity with the institution of slavery. For the past six decades historians have spilled much ink conjuring up images of insincere and hypocritical commitment on the part of Southern Christians’…
Rod O'Barr
May 21, 2024
Blog

Deplorables

I have lived for more than half a century in a region of Lexington County, South Carolina, known as “the Dutch Fork.” So called because it was settled in the early 1700s by German (Deutsch) farmers looking for good soil. “Fork” because it  begins  in the fork of the Broad and Saluda rivers. The original settler families are still there,…
Clyde Wilson
May 20, 2024
Blog

Cicero and the South

William Byrd II of Westover on the James River in Colonial Virginia lived a full generation before Thomas Jefferson, but they are comparable in their intellectual pursuits. Byrd had perhaps the largest library in the colonies, certainly below the Potomac River, and he began each day by reading, usually ancient authors, Greek or Roman, in the original languages. Private diaries…
Charles Roberts, MD
May 16, 2024
Blog

Did Jefferson Really “Hate” Patrick Henry?

Writes Thomas Jefferson to Leavit Harris concerning Patrick Henry (11 Oct. 1824): I never heard anything that deserved to be called by the same name with what flowed from him, and where he got that torrent of language is unconceivable. I have frequently shut my eyes while he spoke, and, when he was done, asked myself what he had said,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 15, 2024
Blog

The Second Battle of Atlanta

My brother and I have often fantasized about combining western North Carolina (my birthplace and my extended family’s home since the 1820’s), eastern Tennessee, and north Georgia into a new state.  What a stronghold of conservatism she would be!  We had always thought that Atlanta, the largest metropolitan area in the South, would be the economic hub of our new…
Philip Dickey, MD
May 14, 2024
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Never Reconciled: Boston’s Revenge

“Then the Lord said unto me, out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.”  Jeremiah. 1:14. Harvard University has a memorial to all its students who were killed in military service, including several Nazis. The only omission is of  some Americans---Confederates. I know of about a dozen Confederate generals who attended Harvard,…
Clyde Wilson
May 13, 2024
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Wendell Berry’s 400-Year-Old Debts

Love of cultivated land is a gift—born not from the unbridled wilds but the furrows of tilled soil. This gift, neither wrought nor feigned, cannot be bought nor swapped like an old mule, but rather, is bestowed upon us as a boon from our shared Agrarian Patrimony. Wendell Berry is a fortunate heir and shares his Southern heirloom generously through…
Chase Steely
May 10, 2024
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Looking for Samuel, I Found George and Bobby…I Think

Since the 1600s the people of the Northern Neck (NNK) of Virginia and of St. Mary's County, Maryland have been connected—not separated—by the Potomac.  They have married each other; they have battled common enemies together: the British in 1776 and 1812 and the Yankees in 1861.  Though they were on the same side in The War, in later years, St.…
J.L. Bennett
May 9, 2024
Blog

The Southern Origins of Anesthesia

Some call it eureka, that moment of inspiration when an imaginative brain makes a connection no one else made. Dr. Crawford W. Long of Georgia possessed this gift when he discovered that ether could be used as an anesthetic in surgery—a long sought remedy after hundreds of years of suffering. What led to Dr. Long’s discovery? First, let’s meet the…
Lorene Leiter
May 8, 2024
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Scopes’ Scoops and Yankees

Gregg Jarrett like most of the “journalists” on Cable TV writes a book and, apparently, as part of   his remuneration, can market the book through the cable broadcast (marketing is the backbone of selling books). In this case, he has written something called The Trial of the Century. This version was such a grand event that it apparently, in Jarrett’s mind,…
Paul H. Yarbrough
May 7, 2024
Blog

The History of Our Southern People

The history of the Southern people, in its broad and significant dimensions, is still to be written. A lot of good history (and a lot of bad history) has been written about the South, but the over-arching theme of most of  this writing has been to treat the South as a peculiarity. The North is normal, the South is to…
Clyde Wilson
May 6, 2024
Blog

The Real Myth America

In early 2023, accused plagiarist and Twitter (Princeton) historian Kevin Kruse published Myth America, a book that promised to replace “myths with research and reality.” You see, Kruse and his co-authors—many of whom are social media “celebrities” for their attacks on “conservative” scholarship—argued that, “The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the…
Brion McClanahan
May 3, 2024
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Jefferson vs. Hamilton, Again

During the French Revolutionary War, President George Washington asks Jefferson’s advice on whether the US ought to respect its treaties with the French government, which was a monarchy prior to the revolution and months after the clean divorcement of the head of King Charles XVI from his body. The request is sensible, for the government of France, formerly monocratic, promises…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 2, 2024
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Wingless Chickens

The great Georgian writer of the mid-twentieth century Flannery O’Connor famously described herself as a “hillbilly Thomist,” a nod both to her Southern origins and her dedication to the medieval theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas. However much yankee intellectuals thumbed their noses at the South, the hillbilly moniker was not a little discordant given the well-educated O’Connor hailed from a…
Casey Chalk
May 1, 2024
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A Forgotten Southern Poet–Columbus Drew

Columbus Drew (1820—1891) was born in Washington D.C to parents who had recently immigrated from England. A journalist as a young man, he was persuaded in 1855 to go to the slowly growing State of Florida and establish a newspaper at Jacksonville. From that time on he was loyal to Florida through the hard days of the Confederacy and Reconstruction…
Clyde Wilson
April 30, 2024
Blog

Two-Lane South

I learned to drive in a pasture. The speed limit didn’t matter; that orange Allis Chalmers tractor could only go so fast on uneven ground. Sweetheart, my grandmother, told too many tales of reckless young boys whose turns on the lumbering machines led to disfigurement and death, so I didn’t try anything too adventurous. That is, until my mother let…
Robert M. Hicklin, Jr.
April 26, 2024
Blog

America’s Prophet

This piece was originally published at IM_1776.com. Cormac McCarthy died at his home in Santa Fe last Tuesday, June 13 (2023), at the age of 89. He was our greatest living novelist, an apocalyptic prophet and diviner of violence, and will forever stand with the likes of Melville and Faulkner as the chief American mythmaker of his time. Born in…
Lafayette Lee
April 25, 2024
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Why “Democracy” Has Failed–And How to Fix It

Democracy in America has failed. In spite of the lack of any reference to “democracy” in both the American Constitution and its Declaration of Independence, the United States has institutionalized the democratic principle to become its world exemplar, which according to some intellectuals is henceforth to be the sole pattern for all governments on earth. Francis Fukuyama, a neoconservative until…
Terry Hulsey
April 24, 2024
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Jefferson as the “Architect of American Liberty”

In Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty, (Basic Books, 2017), John B. Boles offers us another biography of Thomas Jefferson. In his brief introduction, he mentions that his aim is to present Jefferson as “politician, party leader, executive; architect, musician, oenophile, gourmand, traveler; inventor, historian, political theorist; land owner, farmer, slaveholder; and son, father, grandfather.” He cautions readers that his portrait…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 23, 2024
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Washington’s “Unforgivable Sin”?

I have once again embarked upon a topic of historical research. Over the years, a particular individual having caught my attention results in my almost monomaniacal concentration upon the chosen object of study. My present interest arose after watching a replay of the old TV drama, The Crossing, a well done though moderately fictionalized version of George Washington’s attack on…
Valerie Protopapas
April 22, 2024
Blog

He’s Southbound, Lord, He’s Comin’ Home to You

Dickey Betts died. If you need to read a biographical tribute, turn elsewhere.  While there are plenty of cookie-cutter articles about Dickey Betts all over the place, the perspective found here is from a fellow musician, a fellow guitarist, and a fellow Southerner who never met Dickey Betts or ever even saw him perform.  But, oh, what an influence he…
Tom Daniel
April 19, 2024
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Reconstruction Historiography: Ideology vs. History

Reconstruction is the single most confusing and controversial period in American history. The tinderbox of race relations and the new organization of the central government and the states were not reformed reasonably or to the satisfaction of anyone involved, or to any faction that engages the history today. Explanations and justifications for the extreme policies, punitive laws, and social experimentation…
George Bagby
April 17, 2024
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Rethinking Southern Poetry

"Works of fiction--novels and poetry--can mean more to a people than all the political manifestos and reports from all the think tanks and foundations ever established by misguided philanthropy." Tom Fleming, 1982 I take this quote seriously. So should anyone interested in the Southern tradition or in a larger sense Western Civilization. Fleming implored his reader to do so, for…
Brion McClanahan
April 16, 2024
Blog

The Fasola Fellowship

I’m not deaf to the vibrant Country music chatter. Got opinions, but on social media, I made a vow: don't discuss the current thing. Yet, the discourse reminded of something. Donald Davidson was a man of tradition. He liked the old way. Saw a kinship between song meant for singing and verse meant for reading, a stance rare among his…
Chase Steely
April 15, 2024
Blog

Happy Birthday, Thomas Jefferson!

At the request of friend John Spear Smith (1785–1866, figure below), who named a newborn child after him, Thomas Jefferson, in a letter (21 Feb. 1825) that he pens some one and one-half years prior to his death, offers philosophical advice to the newborn child, Thomas Jefferson Smith. The missive takes the form of an epistolary trilogy: an advisory letter,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 12, 2024
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Yankee Cain and Southern Seth

Southerners have often been mocked for their agrarian simplicity by Yankee-minded folks.  We know the insults well by now:  hicks, hillbillies, rednecks, and so on.  But Dixie should not be ashamed of this.  We ought rather to delight and exult in it. Richard Weaver gives us good ground for doing so in his contrast of the Northern/Yankee and Southern types:…
Walt Garlington
April 11, 2024
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Republic or Democracy

Back in 1966, the conservative activist and F.B.I. operative Dan Smoot produced a short film, A Constitutional Republic, Not a Democracy.  Anybody who calls the United States a democracy, he said, is trying to subvert the Constitution of the United States — we’re not a democracy; we’re a republic. Probably because there are supposed to be two political parties here,…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
April 10, 2024
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Saving a Remnant

Nothing is more indicative of the ongoing degradation of American  culture than the fate of the once noble Commonwealth of Virginia—not long ago widely admired as the mother of States and Presidents—inseparable from Patrick Henry, Washington, Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, Lee and Jackson. Now shallow, opportunistic politicians ignorant of American foundations swarm in every Southern State. In Virginia they have…
Clyde Wilson
April 9, 2024
BlogReview Posts

The Gentleman From Virginia

A review of John Randolph of Roanoke (Louisiana State University Press, 2012) by David Johnson One might assume that John Randolph of Roanoke, who may be the most singular individual in American political history, would be the subject of numerous biographies. The earliest attempt to capture something of the man was Powhatan Bouldin’s Home Reminiscences, written in 1878, a book…
John Devanny
April 8, 2024
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Jefferson on “Nation Building”

On July 19, 1823, Adamantios Koraïs—preeminent Greek scholar (1748–1833), philosopher of education, polyglot (Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Dutch, French, and English), and revolutionist—writes to Thomas Jefferson for “help from men truly free.” Circumstances in Greece are parlous. Greeks, under Turkic yoke since the middle of the fifteenth century, are in the midst of a revolution, begun in 1821, and Greeks…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 5, 2024
Blog

Cowboy Carter and Cultural Appropriation

At the time of the Super Bowl in February, 2024, pop singer Beyoncé Knowles released two new singles that sounded a little different than her usual stuff. One of those two singles called Texas Hold ‘Em went to number 1 on the Billboard Hot Country chart and eventually number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. In late March, Beyoncé followed…
Tom Daniel
April 4, 2024
Blog

Soured on the South

I grew up in Virginia, though my accent, apart from a few words and phrases, is almost indistinguishable from my friends from California, Massachusetts, and Michigan. For many Southerners, especially in the Upper South, all that remains of that once rich linguistic heritage are such expressions as “y’all,” “yonder,” and “if I had my druthers.” For that, we can thank…
Casey Chalk
April 3, 2024
Blog

Independence or Subjugation

In the middle of July, 1864, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Kennesaw Mountain had been fought and Sherman was at the gates of Atlanta. In Virginia, Grant had fought Lee for two months and had lost as many men as Lee had in his entire army at the beginning of the campaign, and was now investing Petersburg. Jubal Early's Second Corps…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
April 2, 2024
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Reconciled No More

The U.S. Army’s removal of the Reconciliation Monument from Arlington, with the approval of your Congress, is nothing less than an attempt to remove the Southern people from American history. The lead instigator in this atrocity seems to have been a general with a funny name, not a West Pointer and not a soldier but a bureaucrat.  One of many…
Clyde Wilson
April 1, 2024
Blog

True Virginia Ham

In February 1820, a native Virginian then residing in Richmond wrote a letter to a good friend in Princeton, New Jersey. One of his topics in the missive was how best to prepare a hog for dinner: Altho’ I am sick and harassed with much business I must write soon, least your pork should be too long in brine. .…
Forrest L. Marion
March 29, 2024
Blog

A Confederate in Paris

In March 1861, Ambrose Dudley Mann, a native of Virginia, left the Confederate States of America on a diplomatic mission to Europe, where he remained for the next four years. After his country was defeated in the war, he resolved that he could never return to his native soil unless he returned to an independent South, and so he resided…
Karen Stokes
March 28, 2024
Blog

What Did Jefferson Really Look Like?

A newspaper in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1887 and in 1902 stated that Sally Hemings’ last child, slave Eston Hemings, resembled Thomas Jefferson. Just how that resemblance was established is unclear. Eston Hemings died in 1877; Thomas Jefferson, in 1826. So, the newspaper was reporting that one person that had been dead for 10/25 years resembled another that has been dead…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 27, 2024
Blog

Lincoln Studies and a Stacked Deck

Back in 1949, two researchers, J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman, wanted to sort out the relationship between what we see and how we interpret what we see. They did a proper study of it — “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm”, Journal of Personality, 18:206 ff. (1949), if you want to look it up. Bruner and Postman asked…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
March 26, 2024
Blog

The North’s Victory Unmasked

An aspect of preserving the Southern tradition is rescuing books of wisdom that have been lost and forgotten. That is the case with The United States Unmasked,  published in 1879 by Gabriel Manigault (1809—1888). Manigault was born in Charleston to distinguished patriot families on both sides and married into another such family.  After serving in the defenses of Charleston and…
Clyde Wilson
March 25, 2024
BlogReview Posts

Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

A review of The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (Shoemaker + Company, 2022) by Wendell Berry I had heard of Wendell Berry for quite some time, and though I had an idea of what he was for—‘what I stand for is what I stand on’—I had never read him. I believe that my very first…
James Rutledge Roesch
March 21, 2024
Blog

The Original Meaning of the 14th Amendment

On Friday, March 15, the Abbeville Institute hosted a webinar on the legal scholar Raoul Berger and the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Brion McClanahan hosted legal scholars Allen Mendenhall, William Watkins, and Jesse Meriam for a round table discussion on the Berger, the amendment, and Reconstruction. If you want to learn more about the fraudulent "ratification" of the…
Abbeville Institute
March 20, 2024
Blog

Southern Nationalism

A leftwing scribbler on some website recently called me “a White Nationalist.” He thought that was a conclusive judgment. But I am not now and never have been a “White Nationalist.” I have long been called a Southern nationalist, but that is a different matter. The Southern people are real. White nationalism is merely a Yankee ideology, an abstraction with…
Clyde Wilson
March 19, 2024
Blog

Calhoun’s “Richest Legacy to Posterity”

From Gustavus M. Pinckney, The Life of John C. Calhoun The attentive reader will not have forgotten that in the letter of Mr. Calhoun in reference to his acceptance of the Secretaryship of State he made mention of a project which he had in mind for leisure hours in the home routine to which at that time he looked forward.…
Gustavus M. Pinckney
March 18, 2024
Blog

A Favorite Southern Trio

A few years back, I came to Louisiana for the first time. Being an Indiana Hoosier, I had no idea what dishes were native to this region, aside from gumbo and crawfish. The first Southern meal my Louisiana family introduced me to was red beans and rice. I didn’t know what to expect, but as soon as I took my…
Arianna Brindle
March 15, 2024
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President Davis in Chains

The lamp was always lit So I could sleep but fitfully They'd let me have no chair And only narrow cot, No screen for chamber pot. My worn and skimpy coat Was all they would alot. In silence I could bear The torture of the lamp, the cold, The oozing damp and mold, But when they ushered in the four…
James Everett Kibler
March 14, 2024
Blog

Jefferson and the Indians

I came into possession of Anthony Wallace’s book, Jefferson and the Indians: American Indian Policy in the Formative Years on November 1, 2010. Since then, I have thrice tried to read the book, but I could never get beyond the introduction, and that, for me, is unusual, even when it comes to books, especially books on Jefferson. In his introduction,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 13, 2024
Blog

A New Classic Southern Novel

The highest and most lasting achievement of 20th century American literature is Southern fiction. The great Southern writers present an imagined but realistic world. Unlike usually solipsistic Northern fiction, that world includes families over several generations centered in real places, historical context, memorable characters, and the challenging moral complexity of genuine human living. This great Faulknerian/Agrarian story-telling tradition continues into…
Clyde Wilson
March 12, 2024
Blog

What If Secession Happens Now?

Recently a private polling company called YouGov conducted a survey asking Americans if they advocated the secession of their home state from the United States.  North and South, Democrat and Republican, the distribution was fairly consistent, averaging out to 23 percent in favor of their state’s secession. The survey, as reported on March 6 in the London Daily Mail, didn’t…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
March 11, 2024
Blog

1934: The Last Rebel Yell

In 1934, FDR was the first President to visit Roanoke County, Virginia, since George Washington had 200 years before as a young surveyor and soldier. FDR was to race through Salem (our home town) on his way to honor the new World War I veterans’ hospital nearby. The locals crowded about a right turn where his car had to slow…
Joscelyn Dunlop
March 8, 2024
Blog

What’s a Road

Native Americans once traversed their paths before the founding of the nation. A teenage George Washington traveled them as a surveyor in the mid-eighteenth century. Enslaved blacks built fieldstone walls that line some of them. And Union and Confederate armies once clashed upon them. I’m talking about the gravel roads of Loudoun County in northwest Virginia. If you know anything…
Casey Chalk
March 7, 2024
Blog

Remember the Alamo

I was watching some old true crime story on one of the cable channels recently. Probably a rerun, though I don’t keep up with T.V. and its general blather. As a rule, T.V. is about as entertaining and educational as two goats eating weed grass without disturbing the dandelions. And the “news” is even worse. Anyway, this crime had taken…
Paul H. Yarbrough
March 6, 2024
Blog

Elias Cornelius Boudinot and Confederate-Indian Relations

From the establishment of Jamestown in 1607, until the sundering of the Union, a period of roughly 250 years, English, and later American, governments had a very poor record in relations with Native American tribes. In 1861, however, a new “white” government emerged in the American South, the Confederate States of America. The new Southern Republic sought to gain an…
Ryan Walters
March 5, 2024
Blog

The Birth of Jaffa and the Death of History

There have been a lot of things spoken of Goldwater, from lunatic to nationalist and everything in between. While most historians, on both the right and the left, tend to focus on these well placed propagandist terms, the few points that get perpetually overlooked by any analyst are the significant points of who he was, his own personal platform, how…
Justin Pederson
March 4, 2024
Blog

The Gaslighting Commission and American History

This month marks 160 years since a relatively unrecognized, but noteworthy, battle between Union and Confederate forces in which black soldiers participated in relatively large numbers. The noteworthiness was not in terms of strategic significance, consequential results, exceptional leadership, or recognized valor. Rather, Olustee was the battle in which a relatively recent phenomenon – black U.S. soldier regiments – probably…
Forrest L. Marion
February 29, 2024
Blog

The Use and Misuse of History

“I am heir to  the greatest civilization the world has ever known. I’d like to defend it but I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.” --Alice Teller “By 2050—earlier probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared.  The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed….shall exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually…
Clyde Wilson
February 28, 2024
Blog

Jefferson on the Pleasure of Pleasure Gardening

Thomas Jefferson, like others of his day, was a patron and admirer of the fine arts, which were “fine” because they were autotelic—viz., enjoyed as ends in themselves. The number of the Fine Arts was a matter of debate in his day. To granddaughter Ellen Wayles Randolph (10 July 1805), President Jefferson writes: I must observe that neither the number…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 27, 2024
Blog

I am the South

I AM THE SOUTH (After Padraig Pearse, Mise Eire) I am the South: I am older than Helena's dead. Great my glory: I that bore Jackson and Lee. Great now my shame: My children that bartered a mother. Great now my sorrow: My true sons betrayed. I am the South: I am lonelier than Helena's dead.
James Everett Kibler
February 26, 2024
Blog

Why the North Wanted to Preserve the Union

One of the reasons for forming the United States in 1789 was to permit the thirteen states to trade among themselves with minimal interference. One example of interference occurred two years earlier when New York state unilaterally increased customs fees and assessed heavy clearance fees on vessels arriving from—or bound to—New Jersey and Connecticut. Similar disputes affected others among the…
Philip Leigh
February 23, 2024
Blog

Forgotten Southern Wisdom

Over the years I  have occasionally encountered references to Edward P. Lawton’s book The South and the Nation. I was never able to find it until recently when  I was able to get a copy from  a company in India called Skilled Books.  This reprint is nicely printed and bound without any date or copyright  information. Lawton was from Savannah,…
Clyde Wilson
February 22, 2024
Blog

Self-Evident Truths

Armies sometimes crush liberty, but they cannot conquer ideas. Jabez L. M. Curry (Lieutenant colonel, CSA, 1861-1865) From the African continent to the shores of America, the people coercively enslaved were victims of government action, inaction, or a combination of the two. Whether the government is led by a tribal chieftain or a so-called representative government, all governments are political…
Marshall DeRosa
February 21, 2024
Blog

Thomas Jefferson’s “Holy War”

In a singular letter late in life to John Wayles Eppes (6 Nov. 1813), Thomas Jefferson describes the American Revolution as a “holy war.” He writes, “If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independance.” The letter rather mundanely concerns Jefferson’s abhorrence of banks and paper money. The letter I consider…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 20, 2024
Blog

The Closed Book of Southern Literature

Until the publication of Jay B. Hubbell’s great The South in American Literature 1607-1900 (Duke University 1954), nobody remembered many of the South’s great writers, apart from Edgar Allan Poe and, if only by deprecation, maybe Joel Chandler Harris.  Now nobody remembers Jay B. Hubbell. Hubbell’s work extends beyond scholarship through antiquarianism practically to archaeology.  The chief reason why modern…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
February 19, 2024
Blog

Remembering an American President

From Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis: A Memoir (1890) Mr. Davis’s apparent feebleness had been accompanied by enough increase in weight to encourage my hopes of his health improving. He never stooped, but retained his fine soldierly carriage, and always walked with a light, firm step, and with apparent ease; his voice was sweet and sonorous as ever. A slight deafness…
Varina Davis
February 16, 2024
Blog

Immigration, Race, and Poverty in the North

Mass immigration played a large role in the War for Southern Independence in some obvious ways. It provided a workforce for large scale industrialization, it populated the Midwest and created a large population and economic advantage when war did come, it brought large Catholic and Lutheran populations to the north threatening Yankee cultural purity, and it brought the neo-Marxists 48’ers…
James (Jim) Pederson
February 15, 2024
Blog

Lincoln Sells His Slaves

“The literature on Abraham Lincoln is vast, but it isn’t very good.”  You have to love a book with a first sentence like that!  The book is Kevin Orlin Johnson’s The Lincolns in the White House. While he has some interesting history of the Executive Mansion (the White House) the author is not limited to that one place and  short…
Clyde Wilson
February 14, 2024
Blog

Lincoln on Stilts

Thomas DiLorenzo, the President of the Mises Institute, has already reviewed Paul C. Graham’s Nonsense on Stilts: The Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Imaginary Nation (Shotwell Publishing 2024) in characteristically excellent fashion, but the book is so insightful that some further comments are warranted. It is clear that Graham has a philosophical turn of mind and is a master of linguistic…
David Gordon
February 13, 2024
Blog

Rowan Oak, June 1998

High circling hawk was clue: This is your home My kinsman true. Allspice bush in cedared yard Gave evidences too Green would and blue, The red-tail, far too far to hear Its brittle cry (But at my hone outside the window high, Persimmon perched, we're eye to eye-- Same hawk, same cry.) I leave the hawk behind And walk the…
James Everett Kibler
February 12, 2024
Blog

How Northern Stupidity and Plundering Saved a Southern City

Lynchburg, Virginia, today displays many markers of its Civil War history. There are several signs in and around the city that indicate where Confederate forces were placed in defense of the city. There is a statue of a Confederate infantryman at the top of Monument Terrace. In Riverside Park, what is left of the hull of Marshall, which carried the…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 8, 2024
Blog

New York v. Tennessee

You’ve probably already seen the video of a mob beating up two New York City police officers. The incident happened about 10 days ago in broad daylight in Times Square, one of the most prominent public places and tourist attractions in New York. The video shows two officers apprehending a suspect who resists arrest and is wrestled to the pavement,…
John Avery Emison
February 7, 2024
Blog

Monument Desecration in the U.S.: “If It’s Not Love….”

What do pro-Israel Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, and American Southerners have in common?  First and most obviously, they have proud traditions based on Judeo-Christian ethics.  Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, the predominant religions in the groups, share belief in God though there are many and complex variations in their beliefs and practices.  Second, another important thing they have in common is…
Philip Dickey, MD
February 6, 2024
Blog

Democrats Did Not Keep Lincoln Off the Ballot

Democrat activists in Colorado and Maine dictatorially kicked Trump off the primary ballot in those states.  Historically ignorant Neocons had a field day, labeling the Left as “Neo-Confederates.” Fox News Jesse Watters ranted, “Democrats booted Lincoln off the ballot in 10 states.” Declaring that “history always has a way of repeating itself,” he continued, “Just like Southern Democrats did to…
Carole Hornsby Haynes
February 5, 2024
Blog

Mr. H

When I was in school, many of my teachers were from North Carolina, one of them Miss M., a large and rather loud woman with steel-grey hair.  We liked her much better than her predecessor, the Chicagoan with the prominent nose who mocked our country speech.  We also liked our North Carolinian physical education teacher, a right pleasant person.  And…
J.L. Bennett
February 2, 2024
BlogReview Posts

Stewards of History

Caryl Johnston is a contemporary Southern writer who has so far not received as much recognition as she merits.  That lack was partly corrected in 2021 when the Abbeville Press published her Stewards of History: Land and Time in the Story of a Southern Family. Then last year her fourth volume of verse, Storyteller in Times Square, appeared. Stewards of…
Clyde Wilson
January 31, 2024
Blog

Red Warren and Grandpa

A few days ago, I attended the annual Robert E. Lee Banquet in Virginia. I felt so at home and surrounded by Southern comrades who shared my values. We all had a grand time. In these trying days, it is very difficult to stand up for traditional Southern values. I often think of my mentor Cleanth Brooks--whose grandfather was a…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh
January 30, 2024
Blog

God Bless Texas

On Friday, 26 January, Slate magazine ran a piece entitled “GOP Governors Invoke the Confederate Theory of Secession to Justify Border Violations.” Slate has an interesting definition of “border violations.” A sensible, normal person would think that meant crossing the border illegally. Slate uses the phrase to refer to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has taken steps to guard his…
Earl Starbuck
January 29, 2024
BlogPodcast

Ep. 8: Remembering “Stonewall”

The Essential Southern Podcast is back for 2024. Our first episode of the year, "Remembering Stonewall" is out now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe, like, comment, and leave a review where you can. In 1895, "Stonewall" Jackson's widow, Mary Anna Jackson, penned her "Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson" as a tribute her her late husband. This selection is a…
Abbeville Institute
January 27, 2024
Blog

A Misunderstood Southern Hero

We Southerners  have our heroes, Lee, Jackson, Hampton, Longstreet, Hood, Pettigrew, and the list goes on. But few of us look to the likes of William Quantrill as hero material, most likely due to his fighting  tactics not being in line with with “gentlemanly” warfare. He is generally denigrated for his planning and execution of the raid on Lawrence, Kansas. …
Keith Redmon
January 25, 2024
Blog

Remembering John Taylor of Caroline

Prophet of Encroaching Tyranny John Taylor of Caroline was a man of the American Revolution. During the fight for independence, he served in the Continental Army and Virginia militia. He left the latter at the end of the war with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Military life molded his character as it did for so many other men, but the enduring…
William J. Watkins
January 24, 2024
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Jefferson’s Use of Grids and Octagons was Racist?

Irene Cheng's "The Racial Geometry of the Nation: Thomas Jefferson's Grids and Octagons" is indicative of the wokeist/Postmodernist plight of academic scholarship today vis-à-vis Thomas Jefferson. There is a smoothness to the essay and a structure, and there are sprinkled in several “technical” terms to give the essay quasi-intellectual feel. Yet that is on the level of “feel.” Careful critical…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 23, 2024
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Remembering “Stonewall”

From Mary Anna Jackson, Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson (1895) in honor of "Stonewall" Jackson's birthday. My own heart almost stood still under the weight of horror and apprehension which then oppressed me. This ghastly spectacle was a most unfitting preparation for my entrance into the presence of my stricken husband; but when I was soon afterwards summoned to his chamber,…
Mary Anna Jackson
January 22, 2024
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Lee in Darkness

Lee, “a public nuisance” “Not marble nor the gilded monuments . . .” Shakespeare, Sonnet 55 “It is history that teaches us to hope.” Robert E. Lee A century and more he stood alone Atop his column, elevated, grave, Arms folded, in full military dress, Looking hard north from where “those people” came. Now workers come, in bulletproof vests and…
David Middleton
January 19, 2024
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Ol’ Fred

FRED CHAPPELL was America's greatest living writer. Of that I have no doubt, not that the modern miasma of contemporary letters offered him much serious competition.  (His only rivals for the epithet were Cormac McCarthy, now passed, and Wendell Berry, nearing ninety.) He was a master of most every major literary genre - poetry, fiction, criticism, et al. His scope…
Randall Ivey
January 18, 2024
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Southerners Built Panama

Colonel William Crawford Gorgas, son of Confederate general Josiah Gorgas, Jefferson Davis’ chief of ordnance, was already a world renowned doctor before he ever set foot in Panama. In the final days of the Spanish–American War, Gorgas was Chief Sanitary Officer in Havana, where he eradicated yellow fever and malaria by identifying its transmitter: the Aedes mosquito. (Previously, people had…
Casey Chalk
January 17, 2024
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Blaming the Tool

There is an old maxim from a better time: “It is a poor workman who blames his tools.” The idea is, of course, that some people who fail at an effort in which they engage are more than likely to blame “circumstances” rather than themselves. I have found this maxim helpful in matters far more esoteric than mere physical labor…
Valerie Protopapas
January 16, 2024
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Lincoln’s Prisoners

Within two months of taking office, in the midst of what he termed a “rebellion” and an “insurrection” against the national authority, the President of the United States took an extraordinary action. Sending a letter to the army’s commanding general about the deteriorating situation, the commander-in-chief authorized the suspension of habeas corpus, a legal safeguard that requires a detained citizen…
Ryan Walters
January 11, 2024
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Baron Munchausen Redux

Editor's note: John Marquardt published his farewell recently, but he thought this needed to be discussed and as such is his postscript. As I wrote in my 2015 Abbeville article, a century prior to the War of Secession, Rudolf Rase, a German pseudo-scientist and notorious swindler, wrote a book entitled "Baron Munchausen’s Narratives of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in…
John Marquardt
January 10, 2024
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The Kingdom of Callaway

Any casual student of history will be familiar with the two primary antagonists of the War for Southern Independence: the Confederate States of America and the United States of America rump state.  There was one additional participant, however, of which few are aware: Callaway County, Missouri.  On October 27, 1861, Federal officers representing the United States of America and Colonel…
Trevor Laurie
January 9, 2024
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Setting Aside Historical Accuracy

The recent video, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” by journalist Liz Collin and Dr. J.C. Chaix, is chillingly eye-opening. The documentary, following the book, “They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and the Death of George Floyd, is painstakingly researched. It shows convincingly that the four officers, who were involved in the arrest of George Floyd on the day of his passing,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 8, 2024
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Robert E. Lee and the DOD

Every once in a while, I read a book that is so flawed, biased and outright wrong that I can hardly finish it. Such is the case with “Robert E. Lee and Me” by Tyrus Seidule. I have always sought to give those who disagree me a fair hearing. Occasionally I may even learn something. But in Mr. Seidule’s case,…
Joe Haines
January 5, 2024
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The Confederate Gold, FOUND!

A review of The Rebel and the Rose: James A. Semple, Julia Gardiner Tyler, and the Lost Confederate Gold, by Wesley Millett and Gerald White, ‎Cumberland House Publishing, August 24, 2007. Millett and White have written a terrific “three-‘fer”: A wartime romance, a history of the flight from Richmond, and an economic reckoning of the Southern Treasury. They have succeeded,…
Terry Hulsey
January 4, 2024
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Go South, Young Man

There is a venerable American tradition — at least as old as Alexis de Tocqueville — to contrast the energy, ingenuity, and virtue of the North with the slow, backward, hypocrisy of the South. In Tocquevile’s influential work Democracy in America, published in 1831, we read: “The banks of the Ohio River provided the final demonstration… time and again, in…
Casey Chalk
January 3, 2024
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Blame Republicans

In February 2000, Republican presidential candidate John McCain told “Face the Nation” that he considered the Confederate Battle Flag to be “offensive” and a “symbols of racism and slavery.” Candidate George W. Bush remarked that while he considered the display of the flag to be a state issue, he refused to allow Confederate symbolism at the Texas statehouse and had…
Brion McClanahan
January 2, 2024
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Christmas in Dixie

Editor's Note: This is our final post of 2023. I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. We will be back January 2, 2024. Until we meet again.... The older that I get, it seems the less I enjoy the Christmas season. So much is now packed into the month of December, that it is hard to…
Keith Redmon
December 27, 2023