Explore the Southern Tradition
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History is the propaganda of the victorious. – Voltaire The ubiquitous claim that the so-called “Civil War” (which it was not), was “about” slavery (which it was not), and the “righteous” North went to war against the “traitorous” South to free the slaves (which it did not) is the most bald-faced lie of American history, and, as Thomas Carlyle stated...
“A meddling Yankee is God’s worst creation; he cannot run his own affairs correctly, but is constantly interfering in the affairs of others, and he is always ready to repent of everyone’s sins, but his own.”[1] So opined a North Carolina newspaper in 1854, a quote also attributed to Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill. And yet, 172 years later, Southerners...
Originally published at Ms. Esposito’s Substack. At best, you were not told the whole story. At worst, you were deliberately lied to. Either way, you have it wrong. Nashville, Tennessee For more than a century and a half, Americans have been trained to repeat one sentence. One slogan. One simplified conclusion. “The war was only about slavery.” Say it enough...
The following is an abridged summary of the first three chapters of Dixie in Decay (and How to Heal Her) by Elias John Ryan Dixie is in decay. Our tradition of self governance is being flattened by an overreaching federal government. A once vibrant culture is being overridden by technology and mass immigration. Our economy is being corrupted by crony...
History tends to remember songs, and is considerably less interested in the people who made sure there was somewhere to sing them. Benjamin Franklin White is one of those people. Born in Union County, South Carolina, in 1800, he spent the better part of his adult life in Hamilton, Georgia, where he taught singing schools, compiled tunebooks, presided over conventions,...
About this time every year, cruise ship historians like to trot out articles justifying the mass slaughter of innocents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. America had no choice but to drop the atom bombs, the basic argument goes. Mainstream media coverage in Japan tends to leave the subject, “America,” out altogether. It was war in the abstract that is to blame,...
Some two months ago, I asked historian Courtney Crowley, who has become a member of our team at “Thomas Jefferson Lives” (aka, The Real Thomas Jefferson), if she could email four persons in the “Onufian Family”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Andrew Burstein, Kevin Gutzman, and of course “dude” himself, Peter Onuf—and ask whether any would participate in a debate on Jefferson’s avowed paternity....
Many years ago, I asked myself, “Who am I” then “what do I know about myself?” That turned into exploration about “who I am,” which in turn, evolved into “where do I come from” and finally “who did I come from?” I think today people are caught up so much on the first question, that the development of the idea...
If anyone in Dixie is worthy of the title ‘Teacher of the South’, it is Reverend Moses Waddel. A summary of the major Southern figures who attended the academy he established at Willington, South Carolina, as students would be convincing enough: ‘Among the names are William H. Crawford, a pupil in the Appling school and an assistant at Willington; John...
If we could travel back to the summer of 1860, a time when the two political parties were busy lining up acceptable candidates, preparing for national conventions to nominate someone for President, and trying to hold their fragile components together, little did people know the political chaos that was about to unfold throughout the year, and little did they know...
From the Jefferson Davis X Account. (Let’s Play Devil’s Advocate and Watch the Whole Argument Collapse Anyway) Look, I’ll bite. Let’s pretend—just for the sheer entertainment value—that South Carolina’s secession in December 1860 was nothing but a cold-blooded plot to safeguard the institution of slavery. No states’-rights talk. No tariff gripes. No constitutional compact theory. Just pure,…
