Free Republic

For a 56th birthday present to himself, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) (R-North Carolina) took perhaps the most aggressive step yet against the Republican Party’s establishment. It marked perhaps the most bombastic challenge to House Speaker Rep. John Boehner’s (R-OH) (R-Ohio) leadership, and another point at which long-simmering tensions within the Republican caucus have exploded out into the open.

As the sun went down after the 1862 Battle of Shiloh during the Civil War, some soldiers noticed that their wounds were glowing a faint blue. Many men waited on the rainy, muddy Tennessee battlefield for two days that April, until medics could treat them. Once they were taken to field hospitals, the troops with glowing wounds were more likely to survive their injuries — and to get better faster. Thus the mysterious blue light was dubbed “Angel’s Glow.” In 2001, 17-year-old Civil War buff Bill Martin visited the Shiloh battlefield with his family and heard the legend of Angel’s...

Foote's narrative is such a breath of fresh air when compared to much of the politically motivated and agenda driven Civil War history of recent years. That alone would make it bad enough but, in addition, much of what is being written is not only poor history, it is poor literature. (Foote remains of the few adults in a room of Civil War historians populated by juveniles.)

Booker T. Washington In 1857, the Supreme Court, with seven of the nine justices being Democrat, decided that Dred Scott was not a citizen, but property. Chief Justice Roger Taney, appointed by Democrat President Andrew Jackson, wrote that slaves were “so far inferior … that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for their own benefit.” After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment was adopted Dec. 6, 1865, abolishing slavery in America. Once Southern Democrats were forced to free their slaves, they attempted to effectively re-enslave them by passing “Black Codes” and “Jim Crow Laws” which...

About 80 descendants of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd marked Friday's 150th anniversary of Mudd's July 24, 1865, arrival at an isolated Gulf of Mexico fort where he was imprisoned after splinting the broken leg of President Abraham Lincoln's assassin. Wearing "Free Dr. Mudd'' T-shirts, the group toured Fort Jefferson, a former Union military prison on an island 68 miles west of Key West in remote Dry Tortugas National Park. Most visited the cell where Mudd spent four years after being convicted as a co-conspirator in Lincoln's assassination. Great-grandson Tom Mudd, who spearheaded the pilgrimage, believes the doctor was unaware of...

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“The Civil War never ended”: Jesse Jackson on the racist agenda that must come down with the Confederate flag"..Full Headline Since the homicidal evil named Dylann Roof claimed the lives of nine black worshipers in Charleston, South Carolina, the country has commissioned a conversation about racial harmony and diversity. The audible defeat in President Obama’s voice when he made yet another call for gun control to millions of deaf ears was an early signal of legislative dysfunction, and the political system’s inability to react meaningfully to crisis. Politics under the noxious regime of slavery and under the nominal promise of...

The victors of war write its history in order to cast themselves in the most favorable light. That explains the considerable historical ignorance about our war of 1861 and panic over the Confederate flag. To create better understanding, we have to start a bit before the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the war between the Colonies and Great Britain. Its first article declared the 13 Colonies “to be free, sovereign and independent states.” These 13 sovereign nations came together in 1787 as principals and created the federal government as their agent. Principals have always...

'After Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president of the United States, died 130 years ago today, a million and a half Americans watched his funeral procession. His mausoleum was a popular tourist attraction in New York City for decades. But for most of the 20th Century, historians and non-historians alike believed Grant was corrupt, drunken and incompetent, that he was one of the country's worst presidents, and that as a general, he was more lucky than good. A generation of historians, led by Columbia's William A. Dunning, criticized Grant for backing Reconstruction, the federal government's attempt to protect the rights...

Group takes a shovel to Confederate General’s grave Posted 10:18 pm, July 22, 2015, by Eryn Taylor MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A group was fed up with waiting, so they got a shovel and dug up a patch of grass next to Nathan Bedford Forrest’s grave and statue in a public park in the Medical District. The group says they wanted the statue and remains removed for a long time, because he was a Confederate soldier, a KKK leader and a slave trader. “If he’s gone, some of this racism and race-hate might be gone,” said Isaac Richmond with Commission on...

undreds of Ukrainian right-wingers rallied in Kyiv on July 21 to protest against government policies in the wake of a deadly standoff between radical nationalists and police in the country's west. Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh announced that his group would start a campaign to conduct a national referendum on whether President Petro Porshenko and his government should be impeached and an “absolute blockade” set up against territory in eastern Ukraine under the control of pro-Russian separatists.

We call the war of 1861 the Civil War. But is that right? A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis no more sought to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington sought to take over London in 1776. Both wars, those of 1776 and 1861, were wars of independence. Such a recognition does not require one to sanction the horrors of slavery. We might ask, How much of the war was about slavery? Was President Abraham Lincoln really for outlawing slavery? Let's look at his...

Whenever members of the Judah P. Benjamin Camp of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans don their grey wool uniforms for a demonstration or re-enactment, Al McCray is there among his brothers. Quick Clicks Rally supports Baker Courthouse... NAACP wants Ga. Confederate... Thousands rally to support... Flag debate highlights racial... Confederate signs defaced in... He marches in the parades and flies the Confederate flag. He speaks out against the notion that the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of racism and defends "Southern heritage" causes. Yet McCray is different from the rest of the camp. While the other members are...

JULY 17--But who will care for all those Confederate flags? The North Carolina man who responded to the South Carolina church massacre by further covering his property in the rebel flag was arrested and jailed this week on a probation violation charge, records show. Edward Lee West, 69, is locked up in the Nash County jail in advance of an August 5 court appearance. Seen in the adjacent mug shot, West was collared Wednesday afternoon. According to court records, a judge issued an arrest warrant for West after he failed to show up last week for a court hearing on...

WEST POINT, N.Y. ─ Following the decision of the South Carolina government to remove the Confederate flag from a state memorial, and the subsequent, nation-wide uproar over all things Confederate, West Point has announced that it will posthumously revoke the diplomas of all cadets who graduated from the Academy and fought for the South during the Civil War. “This sends a clear message to slave-owners and those who would fight for such a horrific cause that 150 years after most of them died we will not tolerate such atrocities on American soil,” said Lt. Col. Thomas Jackson, a spokesman for...

Former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen R. Reed was charged Tuesday with a battery of theft, fraud and bribery charges that, if proven, would stamp corruption in indelible ink on the Reed Era. They would also likely put Reed, who has been out of office since January 2010 and has indicated his intent to fight for vindication, in jail. The 65-year-old Reed was arraigned before Magisterial District Judge William Wenner Tuesday on charges that go right to the heart of his longtime role as benevolent dictator of Pennsylvania's Capital City.

Two policemen were wounded in explosions at two district police stations in the west Ukrainian city of Lviv on Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said, linking the cases to a deadly standoff between a far-right group and police over the weekend. In a statement, the ministry said the entrances to the stations had been booby-trapped with explosives and the safety clip of a grenade was found at one of the sites. "The Interior Ministry connects these explosions with events in the Carpathian region (in western Ukraine), organized with the aim of destabilizing the situation in the country," it said. On Saturday,...

This 1938 Jackson Daily News article tells the story of how the Southern governors fought to level the playing field with the North when it came to railroad freight rates. The railroad commissions kept the freight rates very slanted towards the North. Canada, yes- Canada, enjoyed lower freight rates on railroads than did the South; so slanted weighted against the South were the rates. Thus a builder in New Orleans could get steel shipped more cheaply from Pittsburgh than he could from Birmingham....

In the wake of the recent murders in a South Carolina church, the killer's hope of igniting a race war produced the opposite effect. Blacks and whites in South Carolina came together to condemn his act and the race hate behind it. Some saw in the decision to remove the Confederate flag from in front of the state house a symbolic repudiation of the old South's racial past — and the end of the Civil War. But, unfortunately, wars do not end until both sides decide that it is over. The black parishioners who expressed forgiveness toward the killer did...

The Confederate Flag Needs To Be Raised, Not Lowered Ladies and gentlemen, I submit that what we see happening in the United States today is an apt illustration of why the Confederate flag was raised in the first place. What we see materializing before our very eyes is tyranny: tyranny over the freedom of expression, tyranny over the freedom of association, tyranny over the freedom of speech, and tyranny over the freedom of conscience. In 1864, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne warned his fellow Southerners of the historical consequences should the South lose their war for independence. He was truly a...