Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis all prayed at the church at one point or another during the war. It was there in April 1865 that Davis learned that Richmond must be evacuated. So, why the cold shoulder? It’s hard to tell at this point, but here is what we know. Yesterday the [...]
Sons of Confederate Veterans
I am making my way through a small collection of essays in Thomas Brown’s Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Fitz Brundage opens his essay on African American artists, who have interpreted the Civil War in recent years, with a reference to Willie Levi Casey. You can see [...]
[Cross-Posted at the Atlantic] One of the things that jumps out at you when you look closely at the profile of the African Americans celebrated by the Sons of Confederate Veterans as “black Confederate soldiers” is that they were all body servants. The best examples include Aaron Perry, Weary Clyburn, and Silas Chandler. They “followed” [...]
In a recent speech, Ed Ayers suggested that “the enemy of Civil War history is everything people think they know about the conflict.” We could just as easily point to what people don’t know as that enemy. I am not going to say anything new about this most recent case of a slave being honored [...]
It should come as no surprise that Representative Benton is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. This past weekend an SCV camp in South Carolina honored a slave for his “service” to the Confederacy. Unfortunately, his personal history has no significance or meaning beyond the vague references that support the SCV’s narrow and [...]
[H/T to Andy Hall at Dead Confederates] I chose not to comment on this story when it broke the other day in central Texas. Turns out a noose was discovered hanging from a large Sons of Confederate Veterans billboard along Highway 290. This was reported by a member of the local chapter of the SCV, [...]
The coins represent all thirteen Confederate states. Somehow the 9-11 commemorative coin collection makes this looks reasonable. Oh…inventory is limited so order yours today.
It should come as no surprise that a National Air and Space Museum exhibit centered around the Enola Gay and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb would cause controversy in the mid-1990s. Many of the veterans of WWII were still alive and the issue itself tugged at how Americans saw themselves as moral leaders on [...]
