Free Republic

There is nothing stranger in American history than the up-and-down reputation of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant, who was born April 27, 1822, was the commanding general who ended the Civil War. He managed the great campaigns that captured Vicksburg and Richmond, saved Chattanooga, and compelled the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the main Confederate field army, and did it so well that President Abraham Lincoln apologized for not showing him enough confidence. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs,” published after he died in 1885, are a landmark of 19th-century American prose. Grant may be a greater example even than Lincoln of the...

Baltimore is burning because community organizers and various thugs are tearing the city apart in the aftermath of the strange death of a young black man who was in the custody of police — and President Obama is trying to make things worse.In an incredible non-coincidence the rioting follows a weekend rally by the Occupy Wall Street-like Baltimore Peoples Assembly. There also was a first wave of rioting over the weekend. Outside activists have been flooding into Baltimore, according to reports. Police and civilians have been injured. A CVS store was looted and set on fire. Rioters chopped up fire...

Headq'rs Maryland Volunteers in Virginia, may 22d, 1861. General Order. Having been assigned by his Excellency the Governor of the State, and Advisory Council, to the command, for the present, of such volunteers from Maryland as may offer their services, the undersgned advisen immediate organization into companies of not less than fifty men, who will elect their own officers. The certificates of election will be returned to the commanding officer, who will forthwith procure the proper commissions. Each company will consist of one Captain, one First and one Second Lientenant , four Sergeants, four Corporale, and at leagt forty-two privates....

In his 1861 "Cornerstone Speech", Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander H. Stephens said the following: But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other — though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock...

Five dollars was all she was paid by the Atlantic Monthly Magazine for her poem, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," published FEBRUARY 1, 1862. It became Lincoln's favorite song and the Union's theme song. Her name was Julia Ward Howe, the daughter of a Wall Street banker and the wife of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, director of a school for the blind in Boston, which grew into the famous Perkins Institute. Julia and her husband entertained John Brown in their home and published the anti-slavery journal Commonwealth. In 1861, Julia traveled to Washington, D.C., and saw the city teeming...

It’s hard to determine which is more surprising: the British aching to send troops and materiel to aid the Confederacy during the Civil War or that the first “Special Relationship” was between the U.S. and Russia against the British. Both of these facts are true and for the latter negating the former, we can thank one Cassius Marcellus Clay. Clay was more than just a namesake for the greatest boxer of all time. He was also a politician, representative, officer in the Mexican War and Civil War, abolitionist, and ambassador with a pedigree in badassery. This man once frightened an...

Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world. The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart...

The death penalty is like gun rights in Texas politics: Candidates don’t dare get in the way of either. But Republican Greg Abbott, the favorite to succeed Gov. Rick Perry, must soon make a decision as attorney general that could disrupt the nation’s busiest death chamber. It’s an election-year dilemma for Abbott. But in Texas, it’s one that Democratic rival Wendy Davis can’t easily exploit, illustrating the difficulty of navigating the issue in such a pro-death penalty state. Abbott must soon decide whether to stick with his earlier opinions that Texas must disclose the source of the execution drugs it...

Opponents of federal gun control won a victory in the Senate Wednesday. But without a doubt, Congress will pass some sort of gun-control legislation. And that act will certainly violate the Constitution. Our founding document does not delegate firearm-regulating power to Congress or the president. No clause in the Constitution empowers the federal government to ban any type of gun or magazine, create a gun registry or implement a national system of background checks, and the Second Amendment actively restricts federal power in this area. It prevents the federal government from infringing on the right of people to keep and...

Secret Message in Lincoln’s Pocketwatch, 1861 ‘In 2009 the Smithsonian found a “secret” message engraved in Abraham Lincoln’s watch by a watchmaker who was repairing it in 1861 when news of the attack on Fort Sumter reached Washington, D.C. ‘In an interview with The New York Times April 30, 1906, 84-year-old Jonathan Dillon recalled he was working for M.W. Galt and Co. on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, where he was repairing Lincoln’s watch. The owner of the shop announced that the first shot of the Civil War had been fired. Dillon reported that he unscrewed the dial of the watch,...

For the next several days, I will publish letters and Essays by Vladamir Lenin On the United States. Examine Bolshevik views on the US way of life and free market. I hope you all find it very interestingEXCERPT The two ways I have indicated of "solving" the agrarian question in developing bourgeois Russia correspond to the two paths of development of capitalism in agriculture. I call these two paths the Prussian and the American paths. The characteristic feature of the first is that medieval relations in landowning are not liquidated at one stroke, but are gradually adapted to capitalism, which...