Tag: abolitionism

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When I was a child, Thanksgiving was little more than midway point between Halloween and Christmas, lacking the magic of either. I didn’t much like the food (except pumpkin pie), I hated football (and still do), and I found my great-grandfather’s extreme old age somewhat disquieting. However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate this late autumn feast, to the point that it is now one of my favorite days of the year.

In retrospect, I fondly recall making the drive to my grandparents’ country home on a cold and rainy day — that is how I always remember it — where my extended family had assembled and the scent of roasting turkey and sweet potatoes pervaded the house. (more…)

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When I headed to the nineteenth American Renaissance conference last weekend (held once more in the beautiful Montgomery Bell State Park in Dickson County, Tennessee), I was uncertain as to what the mood would be. I was hoping the conference would energize me — but the opposite result was also possible. (more…)

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Eric Burin
Slavery & the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society
Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 2005 (more…)

Thomas Nelson Page

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What was life like in the antebellum South? Obviously it’s going to be a matter of perspective. Thomas Nelson Page provided one such viewpoint, the type we seldom hear about lately. He was a lawyer in his early career and a diplomat later, but is best known as a writer.

Aside from several novels, he published a non-fiction account of the Old South as he remembered it during his boyhood. This was Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897). It’s a quick read, providing a glimpse into a bygone time. (more…)

Hinton Rowan Helper

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Hinton Rowan Helper was a curious and fascinating figure from nineteenth-century American history. Although mostly forgotten today, he was one of the most important and discussed men in the nation during the lead-up to the Civil War. As an unswerving race realist and white patriot at a time when whites were by far the dominant racial group in North America, he was (and probably still is) ahead of his time. (more…)

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Prince William and his wife Kate Middleton recently concluded their tour of the Caribbean to celebrate the Queen’s platinum jubilee. Commentators contend that the trip was orchestrated to highlight the relevance of the monarchy in a region where the demand for republican status is escalating. (more…)

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Some eminent notables have claimed that the American Civil War had substantial roots in literature. Mark Twain, for example, said of Sir Walter Scott that he was “in great measure responsible for the war.” That proposition is debatable, of course. This argument hinges on how much the widespread influence of his romanticized chivalric prose bolstered the South’s hyper-thumotic stance — in plainer words, piss and vinegar — which contributed to secession, and shortly thereafter a war that went horribly awry. (more…)

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So they want to ban Gone With the Wind? Pity, because a movie they would really like to strangle is Santa Fe Trail. Made in 1940, Santa Fe Trail is an Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland Western with lots of action and romance that discusses slavery and the Southern point of view in rational terms.

Errol Flynn plays Jeb Stuart, and Ronald Reagan plays George Custer. They are classmates at West Point in 1854 (more…)

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Spanish translation here

Michael Hoffman
They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America
Dresden, New York: Wiswell Ruffin House

Every few years or so a book comes around that rips your foundations from under you and makes you re-question pretty much everything. For me, Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago are two such books. Michael A. Hoffman’s They Were White and They Were Slaves is another. (more…)

Benjamin Haydon, The Anti-Slavery Convention, 1840, 1841.

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The white race is uniquely altruistic. Why? This is a very difficult question to answer. It is easy to understand altruistic behavior for the benefit of one’s family members. This is common among animals. Mother bears will put their lives in danger to protect their cubs from attack. Sacrifices for one’s relatives and ingroup ethnic members (more…)

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Steve Luxenberg
Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, And America’s Journey From Slavery to Segregation
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019

Steve Luxenberg is a Washington Post associate editor and protégé of the Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. In 2019, he published a book called Separate, which describes the (more…)

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Unless you’re a Texan, you probably never heard of Juneteenth until last week.

This holiday celebrates the end of slavery and has long been a minor holiday in the Lone Star State. It commemorates the day — June 19, 1865 — where the Union declared all slaves in the state of Texas free, (more…)