Free Republic

Democrats and supporters of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on Wednesday after she refused to name slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War. Haley, 51, made the apparent gaffe during a town hall event in Berlin, NH, after a voter asked the former United Nations ambassador to identify the cause of the deadliest war in American history. The White House hopeful appeared caught off guard by the question and failed to mention the antebellum South’s “peculiar institution” in her response. “I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government...

Here is my question. Was the North intending to end slavery to make growing cotton in the South untenable for the plantation owners in order to bankrupt them so that the Northern Textile barons could take over the land? I know the South seceded because the North was trying to end slavery, which would have raised the cost of growing cotton because the plantation would now have to pay wages, instead of trading labour for bodily needs. This likely was not an affordable option for the landowners, because the North was not going to pay a penny more for cotton...

Listen now.

The late Great Walter Williams makes it quite clear that he believed the South had a right to secede.

James K. Polk was one of the most successful presidents in our history, exceeded in his accomplishments only by Washington, Lincoln, and Jackson. He had four goals when he took office in 1845, and he achieved all of them in his one term. He wanted to complete the process of Texas annexation, take California and its ports of San Diego and San Francisco from Mexico, settle the boundary dispute with Britain over the Oregon Territory, and reform the finances of the federal government. If you include Texas, the amount of territory he added to the United States exceeded that of...

The propaganda that progressives employ is in full bloom, now that they've spent the last 120 years dumbing us down through government controlled grade schools. One of the favored propaganda devices that they use is that of Samuel Johnson, a well known British author at the time. Johnson examined some of what he heard coming from the Continental Congress and among other observations, asked this question: We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally...

Nothing could be less controversial than having schoolchildren learn a passage from the Declaration of Independence, right? Guess again. Because a recently proposed Louisiana bill requiring just that was shelved last week after a lawmaker implied it was racist and characterized it as a “lie.” Breitbart reports on the story, writing that state Representative Barbara Norton (D; shown) "led the charge against HB 1035, a measure that would require local school boards of education to have students in grades four to six recite a specified section of the Declaration of Independence after the current daily period of silent prayer...

Thomas Jefferson famously adapted key passages of John Locke’s Second Treatise in his draft Declaration of Independence. An 18th century gentleman could hardly regard himself as learned without the ability to quote a few Lockean passages from memory. Yet, what of the average colonial? Books were expensive imports. How were the yeomanry educated well enough in Lockean concepts to readily understand and accept this radical document, the Declaration of Independence? Through newspapers. Like modern Americans, our colonial forebears were also political junkies. Freewheeling editorials, letters to the editor that criticized parliamentary and colonial governments were standing features of public life....

Might as well open a thread on this. This is going to be good.

By March 1865, it was obvious to all but the most die-hard Confederates that the South was going to lose the war. Whether that loss was inevitable is an unanswerable question, but considering various “what if” scenarios has long been a popular exercise among historians, novelists and Civil War buffs... Perhaps the most common scenario centers on the actions of Gen. Robert E. Lee... What many fail to recognize is that Northerners were just as committed to winning as the Southerners. Some saw it as a war to free the slaves, while others fought to ensure that their republican form...

DES MOINES, Iowa — Some Republicans are accusing the party’s neoconservative hawks of playing dirty pool in an attempt to smear Sen. Rand Paul as a bigot for having an aide who once expressed admiration for Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. The aide, Jack Hunter, who quit on Monday, was eased out by Mr. Paul after a neoconservative publication revealed that, as a radio “shock jock” some years ago, Mr. Hunter advocated that the Southern states secede once again from the union. Saying he had become more libertarian and broad-minded since his days as the “Southern Avenger,” Mr. Hunter revealed...

Rand Paul is the most interesting contender for the Republican nomination. And when I say interesting, I mean that in the broadest sense. A case in point: Last week, the Kentucky senator hit some turbulence when the Washington Free Beacon reported that Jack Hunter, Paul’s aide and the co-author of his book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington, was once the Southern Avenger. Who’s that? Starting in the 1990s, as a radio shock-jock, Hunter would wear a wrestling mask made from a Confederate flag, while making jokes about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and having the South re-secede. “Although Lincoln’s...

FRANKFORT — Kentucky Democratic Party Chairman Dan Logsdon called on U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Wednesday to condemn U.S. Sen. Rand Paul's hiring of a staffer with a history of making controversial comments about race. Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online publication, reported Tuesday that Paul staffer Jack Hunter is a former talk-radio host who called himself the "Southern Avenger" and is a former member of the League of the South, a group that advocates Southern secession. "Senator McConnell likes Republicans to call him leader, and he has made himself heard on every issue he deems of consequence, real...

Just south of Gettysburg, a young soldier named John Nevin leads a Pennsylvania regiment across fields freshly scarred by a horrifically violent, three-day clash between two great armies. Trees are shattered and pocked with holes, crops and orchards mowed down by flying lead, fields trampled by tens of thousands of marching men, fences torn apart. A barn and a house, trapped between the two armies, have burned to the ground. Nevin sees human slaughter on a massive scale, with an estimated 8,000 killed, many as yet unburied. The dead, Nevin writes, are "strewn around in various forms of horror," the...

Citizens of the non-slave-holding States of America, swayed by peaceable motives, I have used all my influence, often thereby endangering my position as the President of the Southern Confederacy, to have the unhappy conflict now existing between my people and yourselves, governed by those-well established international rules, which heretofore have softened the asperities which necessarily are the concomitants of a state of belligerency, but all my efforts in the premises have heretofore been unavailing. Now, therefore, I am compelled e necessitati rei to employ a measure, which most willingly I would have omitted to do, regarding, as I always must,...

On Jan. 18, 1863, troops from the 64th North Carolina Infantry under the command of Lt. Col. James Keith lined up 13 men and boys, ranging in age from 13 to 60, made them kneel and shot them at point-blank range. Then the soldiers tossed the bodies into a shallow grave, from where they were later reclaimed by family members for burial. This incident in Madison County, N.C., known to history as the Shelton Laurel massacre, was hardly the worst example of violence visited on civilian populations during the Civil War. On Aug. 21, 1863, scarcely a month after the...

It's really funny to read and observe those who believe they're the smartest people in the room when it comes to historical interpretation. Modern historians like for everyone to believe that studying history is akin to rocket science. Arrogance is so blinding. The faddish altar at which many CW historians are now worshiping has been christened "memory." Actually, it's a good concept--and a biblical one. The word "remember" is used 148 times in Scripture. It's important for a whole host of reasons. Scripturally, God wants us to remember His works in past generations, the consequences of rebellion, and the wisdom...

Global Day of Coordinated Actions on the 2nd Anniversary of the "Shock and Awe" Invasion of Iraq initiated by antiwar organizations worldwide including the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition in the United States Antiwar actions in Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles and in other cities around the country and around the world will take place on March 19/20.