Tag: abolitionism

Thomas Nelson Page

4,261 words

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

2,272 words

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…)

1,084 words

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…)

6,251 words

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…)

1,335 words

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…)

3,665 words

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.

5,142 words

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…)

1,629 words

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…)

1,481 words

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…)

2,307 words

G. M. Flanders
The Ebony Idol
New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1860

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the founding example of white guilt agitprop. Several books were written in response, including a work by Mrs. G. M. Flanders, The Ebony Idol. This obscure genre of counter-propaganda often is called plantation literature, though in this case, the main setting is an idyllic northern town, and effectively, it is more a critique of integration than of abolitionism. (more…)

Harry Truman announcing the Democratic Party’s commitment to “civil rights” at the 1948 convention, after the party’s leadership realized they didn’t need the South’s support to pursue their agenda.

3,770 words

Historians puzzle over how the French Revolution happened. How did a powerful monarchy in a powerful nation fall apart and succumb to a radical government that drenched Paris in blood and turned the world’s most economically valuable colony, San Domingo, into the jungle that is today’s Haiti? There are many reasons, of course: (more…)

6,905 words

Nicholas Guyatt
Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation
New York: Basic Books, 2016

Throughout history, whites have tended to feel a need to dissect the philosophical implications and practical consequences of their actions. Passion and emotion are rarely the driving forces behind white historical movement. (more…)