Free Republic

Read President Trump's comments about Candace Owens and Kanye West, two prominent black celebrities who have endorsed him. "Kanye looks and he sees black unemployment at the lowest it's been in the history of our country, OK? He sees Hispanic unemployment at the lowest it's been in the history of our country. He sees, by the way, female unemployment -- women unemployment the lowest it's been in now almost 19 years. He sees that stuff and he's smart. And he says you know what, Trump is doing a much better job than the Democrats did," Trump said about West. On...

Although he actually died at 7:30 the following morning, today is the anniversary of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) on 14 April 1865, only five days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Lincoln was very fond of the theater, and that evening, he and Mrs. Lincoln - likely in a celebratory mood because of the end of the Civil War - attended a performance of the comedy, Our American Cousin, by English playwright Tom Taylor at Ford's Theater on 10th Street NW in Washington. There, following the intermission, actor and Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth managed to gain access...

While vacationing at Holden Beach in North Carolina last week, 42-year-old Brent Garlington spotted what is thought to be a wrecked Civil War-era steamer. Garlington, of Fayetteville, flew a drone over the Lockwood Folly Inlet, which is located between Holden Beach and Oak Island. The tide was low because of the full moon, Garlington told Fox News on Tuesday. This prompted him to take a walk on the beach sandbar and ultimately capture the footage using a drone. While Garlington didn’t discover the vessel, he believes "this is the first time it has been seen from this perspective." (snip) A...

Confederate Major General John B. Gordon’s troops launch an all-out assault on Fort Steadman in the Union lines surrounding Petersburg, VA. The predawn attack is initially successful. Fort Stedman and a couple of near battery emplacements are captured. But within a couple of hours, Army of the Potomac’s XI corp. counterattack Gordons forces and force them back to the Confederate lines. This is the last time that General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia will attack their old advisory, the Army of the Potomac. Within 15 days, the Army of Northern Virginia will cease to exist.

It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of the people, can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies. ~ Lincoln February 12 is the anniversary of the birth of the 16th - and arguably the greatest - president of these United States, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Born in Kentucky and raised in Illinois, Lincoln was largely self-educated and became a country lawyer in 1836, having been elected to the state legislature two years earlier. He had one term in the U.S. Congress (1847-1849) but failed (against Stephen A. Douglas)...

Subverting the Electoral Process: In his Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln reminded Americans that they were uniquely privileged to have a new birth of freedom that was contingent on “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” That was then. What about now? Every week brings new revelations and details about a cabal in the federal government whose actions border on a conspiracy. The evidence suggests that specific high level officials in the Justice Department and the FBI colluded together to violate the law in unprecedented ways for the singular purpose of subverting the will of the people...

"Historian Garry Adelman describes the events that took place during the Battle of Gettysburg from July 1-July 3, 1863." I found this video very well done in just 4 minutes. Gave me a good start to understanding this complex battle and also something to think about on this day of Pickett's Charge. I don't know how many of you here are well versed with the way the battle went but for me it's still a learning experience.

The Wall Street Journal reported on a trove of Civil War era telegrams — many of them to and from Abraham Lincoln — that have never been decoded. The telegrams are owned by the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. They have started a project, "Decoding the Civil War," to transcribe and decipher their collection of nearly 16,000 Civil War telegrams between Lincoln, his Cabinet and Union Army officers. About a third of the telegrams were written in code. The library is crowdsourcing the project through the largest online platform for collaborative volunteer research, Zooniverse. They...

Like many Americans who were adults in the mid-1970s I was curious to see what the re-make of Roots would look like. I found that the problems with the project actually appeared during an hour long discussion among historians. In the whole hour the word Democrat was not heard and the single reference to a political party was that the “Republicans did not do enough” to help the slaves. As a student of the history of that era I bristled at such textbook knee jerk liberal pap. Here is my response. Save for the 1960s, and the last seven years,...

HOT SPRINGS, Ark. — Police in Hot Springs, Arkansas, have evacuated about 20 homes after a man mistook a Civil War-era landmine for a cannonball and took it home. Police say as of about 4 p.m. Thursday that the U.S. Air Force Bomb Squad was looking for a place to explode the ordinance. Police spokesman Cpl. Kirk Zaner said a Hot Springs man dug up what he thought was a cannonball near Danville. The man put the 32-pound landmine in the back of his pickup and drove about 65 miles home. After researching pictures of Civil War-era weapons, the man...

Even though the Civil War had ended in 1865, political and racial strife continued to northern and southern states. In an attempt to mend the rift, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act in 1867, but many southerners objected to the act saying it favored northern interests and not their own. At the same time, two groups of disenfranchised Americans lobbied for the right to vote – women and blacks. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were among the leading women suffragists. The most prominent among the black suffragists was Frederick Douglas. All these groups wanted was the...

Before when free-soil men invoked the right of revolution in defense of their political rights, proslavery men condemned them for defying the legitimate government. But proslavery men feared the loss of their right to own slaves as much as free soilers feared the loss of the right to exclude slavery. At Hickory Point, [Kansas] a squabble over land claims ignited these political quarrels. A settler named Franklin M. Coleman had been squatting on land abandoned by some Hoosiers, who subsequently sold the claim to Jacob Branson, another Hoosier. In late 1854, when Branson informed Coleman of his legal claim and...

The Civil War is, as Shelby Foote noted, at the crossroads of our being. Looked at one way, it marked the end of a long struggle against slavery and the beginning of a long one for civil rights and racial equality. Looked at another, it marked the end of limited government and the beginning of the encroaching, ever-present Leviathan that exists today. These memories can be both in sync and in conflict. After all, it was the deployment of strong government in the form of a dominant army and the passage of federal amendments that played a large role in...

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...

Civil War Veteran Jacob Miller was shot in the  forehead on Sept.19th 1863 at Brock Field at  Chickamauga. He lived with an open bullet wound  for many years, with the last pieces of lead dropping  out 31 years after he was first shot !

Very cool then & now photo shoot. The women who dug the graves, the kids who watched the largest battle in US history – and the slaves forced to help fighters at the front. 150 years after the last shots were fired, Guardian photographer David Levene travelled across the US photographing the sites scarred by the American civil war. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ng-interactive/2015/jun/22/american-civil-war-photography-interactive

The actions God took to end slavery in North America provide an example of the truth of the religious phrase “God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform

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...

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...

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — “Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson.” That is not exactly what we expect to hear about the president who spoke of “malice toward none,” referring to the president who wrote that “all men are created equal.” Presidents have never been immune from criticism by other presidents. But Jefferson and Lincoln? These two stare down at us from Mount Rushmore as heroic, stainless and serene, and any suggestion of disharmony seems somehow a criticism of America itself. Still, Lincoln seems not to have gotten that message. “Mr. Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson as a man,” wrote William Henry Herndon, Lincoln’s law...