Free Republic

January is the birthday month of War Between the States Generals; James Longstreet born on January 8, 1821, Thomas Jonathan ‘Stonewall’ Jackson born on January 21, 1824, George Pickett born on January 28, 1825 and Thursday, January 19, 2012, is the 205th birthday of General Robert E. Lee.

Thursday, January 19, 2012, is the 205th birthday of General Robert E. Lee, whose memory is still dear in the hearts of people everywhere.

It may be hard to top Shut Up & Sing, but Dixie Chicks are back with something new—and E! News has an exclusive look. The trio of country-singin' ladies and Columbia Records are releasing Dixie Chicks Storytellers, a DVD filled with personal anecdotes and inspiration around some of the band's biggest hits including "Not Ready to Make Nice," "Cowboy Take Me Away" and "Wide Open Spaces." The disc, which drops On Nov.29, will also feature some never before seen performances of "Lullaby," "Easy Silence" and "So Hard," except, you're getting a head start because we have the clip for "So...

ATLANTA — One August night, two men walked into a popular restaurant attached to this city’s fanciest shopping mall. They sat at the bar, ordered drinks and pondered the menu. Two women stood behind them. A bartender asked if they would mind offering their seats to the ladies. Yes, they would mind. Very much. Angry words came next, then a federal court date and a claim for more than $3 million in damages. The men, a former professional basketball player and a lawyer, also happen to be black. The women are white. The men’s lawyers argued that the Tavern at...

“Is the Hank Williams Jr. incident a parallel to the Dixie Chicks?” asks Radio-Info.com, an insider site for the radio industry...the Dallas-based country trio met with both adulation and criticism after singer Natalie Maines told a cheering London audience that she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas,” just 10 days before President George W. Bush ordered a military invasion of Iraq in 2003.

CAIN: So we get to the fountain, my brother and I, and we look around, there wasn't a lot of people there and I said to my brother, "You go first." He tasted the white water and then we looked around and says, "Your turn." We tasted -- I taste the white water. Then we both taste the colored water and we looked at each other, six and seven years old, the water tastes the same. What's the big deal? We had not been taught segregation at the age of six and seven. We wondered what the big deal was...

I’m a Jersey boy. I was born there, went to high school and college there, and assumed I’d spend the rest of my life there. But though I loved the people and food, the Jersey Shore summers, and short rides through the Lincoln Tunnel to Broadway shows and Madison Square Garden, I gave it all up and moved south. Very far south. I’m not alone. According to the latest Census figures, and stories in USA Today, the Associated Press, and elsewhere, the South was the fastest growing region in America over the last decade, up 14 percent. “The center of...

On April 14, 1865, after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, President Abraham Lincoln said: “Now Let the Band Play Dixie; it belongs neither to the South, nor to the North but to us all."

For black Northerners, the reverse migration makes economic -- and emotional -- sense. / RE: Chicago's Shrinking Black Community Experts say that a reverse migration to the suburbs and the South may be irreversible. Why We're Moving: Thomas Clark was one of those committed New Yorkers. "For me it was the whole urban dynamic of being in a big city, being in the financial center of the world," said the former New York state banking official and onetime president and CEO of Carver Federal Savings Bank. Commuting into Manhattan from his White Plains, N.Y., home, the self-described "little guy from...

Confederate soldier stands his groundBy: Danielle Battaglia Published: August 14, 2011 Despite the Reidsville Confederate Monument officially departing his post on Scales Street, another soldier is taking his place and standing up for what he believes is right. On Friday morning, Jamie Funkhouser, the confederate soldier who came to Reidsville in June to raise awareness for the city council meeting discussing the future of the monument, returned to bring awareness to the fact that the soldier will soon be moved. The Reidsville Monument stood at the intersection of Scales Street and West Morehead Street for 101 years until Mark Anthony...

As likely voters preemptively weigh a presidential bid by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, they rightly want to know how the current ostensible GOP frontrunner would perform on Perry’s turf. At a townhall in New Hampshire this week, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney signaled his confidence that he could take several key states in the South — including Perry’s home state of Texas: “I think I can do pretty darn well in Dixie,” Romney said. “Last time around [in his 2008 campaign], I made a real stand in Florida. Now most people don’t consider that Dixie, but it sure is the...

The Revenge of William Tilghman of the S.J. Waring Rebel privateers in the brig Jeff Davis had captured the S.J. Waring on July 7. For the past week, they had been sailing for a Southern port.... .... William Tilghman, the black steward from the original crew of the Waring, concocted a plan to retake the ship. When the Waring was captured, the Confederates cut up the United States flag to piece together a Confederate flag. Tilghman had vowed revenge and his plan addressed such feelings. Just before midnight, with the Confederate captain and two mates asleep and the ship under...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — For some believers and church leaders, opposing Alabama's toughest-in-the-nation law against illegal immigration is a chance for Bible Belt redemption. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and `60s, many state churches didn't join the fight to end Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. Some cross-burning Ku Klux Klan members took off their hoods and sat in the pews with everyone else on Sunday mornings, and relatively few white congregations actively opposed segregation. Some black churches were hesitant to get involved for fear of white backlash. Now that Alabama has passed what's widely considered the...

As an out Presbyterian preacher, I'd experienced prejudice before. But nothing like what I faced in North CarolinaI was reading "Home in Henderson" -- the unofficial city website for a small town in North Carolina where I had recently moved to preach -- when I came across the blog entry. It was posted under the pseudonym "Church Reporter." "A friend that attends the First Presbyterian Church told me to do a Google search on their new minister Brett Webb-Mitchell," the entry began. "Having done so, I have only three comments to make on the pastor selection: 1. Who is responsible...

I had to check my paper copy of the Wall Street Journal today to make sure this wasn’t some elaborate prank. Then I double-checked what year it is, to make sure I hadn’t been slingshotted around the sun and found myself back in 1975. That’s about when I remember it last being routine for Rust Belt lawyers to publicly disparage the skills and education of people from the South. The only thing missing from the op-ed by Chicago-based lawyer Thomas Geoghegan is the word “hick” or “hillbilly.” WSJ is to be applauded for its determination to feature different viewpoints, but...

A century and a half after the opening shots of the U.S. Civil War, nearly four in 10 Southerners say they still sympathize with the Confederacy.

Uncle Bob Brown, a former servant of the Davis family and a passenger on the train, saw the many flowers that the children had laid on the side of the railroad tracks. Brown was so moved by this beautiful gesture that he wept uncontrollably.

The nation lost an historic lady in 2004. Mrs. Alberta Martin, the last known widow of a Confederate soldier, passed away on Memorial Day 2004.

Black, White, Jewish, American-Indian and Hispanic Americans who served the Confederacy during the War Between the States.

I am responding to a column by Leonard Pitts Jr., a noted black columnist for The Miami Herald, entitled, "The Civil War was about slavery, nothing more" (Other Views, April 15). I found this article to be very misleading and grossly riddled with distortions of the real causes of the War Between the States. I find it so amusing that such an educated person would not know the facts. I am a proud native of South Carolina. I have spent my entire life in what was once the Confederate States of America. I am currently associated with Southern Heritage causes,...

I suppose his actions qualify him as posing a severe domestic terrorist threat.

he impending 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War prompted the Harris Poll to gauge American sentiment on what the pollsters deemed “a dark yet formative period in U.S. history.” How should the nation celebrate the anniversary? Their survey used some uncommon criteria to find out. Along with typical regional and age demographics, the pollster designated one group of respondents as “white Confederates” - Caucasian residents of states that were once part of the Confederacy.

A hush fell over the crowd filling the elegant hall in downtown Richmond, Va. The vote was about to be announced, and a young staffer of the Museum of the Confederacy balanced his laptop across his knees, poised to get out the news as soon as it was official. Who would be chosen "Person of the Year, 1861"? Five historians had made impassioned nominations, and the audience would now decide. Most anywhere else, the choice would be obvious. Who but Abraham Lincoln? But this was a vote in the capital of the rebellion that Lincoln put down, sponsored by a...

...Baker, Mallory and Townsend were field hands who — like hundreds of other local slaves — had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.” After a week or so of this, they learned some deeply unsettling news. Their master, a rebel colonel named Charles Mallory, was planning to send them even farther from home, to help build fortifications in North Carolina. That was when the three slaves decided...

Black Americans are leaving northern states and relocating in the south, US census data show. Blacks are not just leaving Michigan, as one would expect. They are leaving New York and Illinois and the two major cities therein: New York City and Chicago. The New York Times reports that those leaving tend to be "younger and better educated." Walter Mead has a long post today on what this reversal of "the great migration" means for the "Big Blue" model of Democratic Party governance. Here's an excerpt: "The failure of blue social policy to create an environment which works for Blacks...

McLEAN, Va. – Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has inspired Americans for generations, but consider his jarring remarks in 1862 to a White House audience of free blacks, urging them to leave the U.S. and settle in Central America. "For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people," Lincoln said, promoting his idea of colonization: resettling blacks in foreign countries on the belief that whites and blacks could not coexist in the same nation.

Back in the Jurassic Era when I was young, we learned “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in school, and I often heard it on the radio on national holidays. We learned two verses, the first and the fifth. The words of the fifth verse made a deep impression on me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. It implanted in my youthful mind the idea that fighting for freedom sometimes requires actually FIGHTING for freedom, which includes the possibility of dying for freedom. But now, I rarely hear this inspiring hymn on...

"After all, I think Forrest as the most remarkable man our 'Civil War' produced on either side.”

Today marks the 150th anniversary of Jefferson Davis' inauguration as the president of the Confederate States of America. On Saturday, the occasion will be celebrated by the Sons of Confederate Veterans with their Confederate Heritage Rally 2011 at the Alabama State Capitol at noon. The group will commemorate the founding of the CSA, the inauguration of Davis and the raising of the first Confederate Flag and will involve re-enactments, cannon fire and speeches. Davis was elected provisional president of the CSA at a congress held in Montgomery on Feb. 9, 1861.

JACKSON, Miss. – Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said Tuesday he won't denounce a Southern heritage group's proposal for a state-issued license plate that would honor Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Barbour is a potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate. Questioned by reporters Tuesday after an energy speech in Jackson, Barbour said he doesn't think Mississippi legislators will approve the Forrest license plate proposed by the Mississippi Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Would you support a car tag featuring Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest?

1861 - The Confederate State of America opened for business when the Provisional Congress convened in Montgomery, Alabama. Seven states that had seceded from the Union were involved.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc said it has dropped plans to build a superstore near the site of an historic 1864 Civil War battlefield in Virginia, bowing to pressure from preservationists. The world's largest retailer had been approved to build on the 52-acre site near Orange, Virginia, but ran into strong opposition from those looking to preserve the site near one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. The Battle of the Wilderness, considered one of the war's turning points, marked the first clash between the two sides' top generals -- Ulysses Grant for the Union and Robert E. Lee of...

The Georgia Division Sons of Confederate Veterans will sponsor their 24th Annual Robert E. Lee birthday celebration on Saturday, January 22, 2011, in the Legislative Chambers of Georgia’s Old Capitol in Milledgeville, Georgia that will begin with a parade to the Old Capitol at 10:45 AM.

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War began, we're still fighting it -- or at least fighting over its history. I've polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even on why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States' rights? Tariffs and taxes? As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war's various battles -- from Fort Sumter to Appomattox -- let's first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began. 1. The South seceded over...

Young people will get a school holiday in remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King whose birthday is January 15th. But, will anyone tell them that January 19th is also the birthday of Robert E. Lee?

It was 150 years ago today that Florida declared itself sovereign from the United States. Some Southern states have marked the anniversaries of secession with celebrations; in South Carolina, a secession gala was met with protests and controversy. In Florida, a reenactment was quietly held by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Tallahassee on Saturday, where about 40 volunteers dressed in period attire performed a condensed version of the convention. It was at that convention where a 62-7 vote led to secession in 1861, making Florida the third state to leave and later join the Confederate States of America.

<p>What is a word worth? According to Publishers Weekly, NewSouth Books' upcoming edition of Mark Twain's seminal novel "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" will remove all instances of the N-word -- I'll give you a hint, it's not nonesuch -- present in the text and replace it with slave.</p>

The Civil War is about to loom very large in the popular memory. We would do well to be candid about its causes and not allow the distortions of contemporary politics or long-standing myths to cloud our understanding of why the nation fell apart. The coming year will mark the 150th anniversary of the onset of the conflict, which is usually dated to April 12, 1861, when Confederate batteries opened fire at 4:30 a.m. on federal troops occupying Fort Sumter. Union forces surrendered the next day, after 34 hours of shelling.

Event marks war's anniversary CHARLESTON -- The shots are solely verbal -- and expected to remain that way -- but at least one Civil War Sesquicentennial event is triggering conflict. The Sons of Confederate Veterans plan to hold a $100-per-person "Secession Ball" on Dec. 20 in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium. It will feature a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago, an act that severed the state's ties to the Union and put the nation on the path to the Civil War. Jeff Antley, who is organizing the event, said the Secession...

Reporting from Newport News, Va. — When archaeologists and Navy divers recovered the warship Monitor's steam engine from the Atlantic in 2001, the pioneering Civil War propulsion unit was enshrouded in a thick layer of marine concretion. Sand, mud and corrosion combined with minerals in the deep waters off Cape Hatteras, N.C., to cloak every feature of Swedish American inventor John Ericsson's ingenious machine, and they continued to envelop the 30-ton artifact after nine years of desalination treatment. This month, however, conservators at the Mariners' Museum here and its USS Monitor Center drained the 35,000-gallon solution in which the massive...

For Democrats in the South, the most ominous part of a disastrous year may not be what happened on Election Day but what has happened in the weeks since. After suffering a historic rout — in which nearly every white Deep South Democrat in the U.S. House was defeated and Republicans took over or gained seats in legislatures across the region — the party’s ranks in Dixie have thinned even further. In Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama, Democratic state legislators have become Republicans, concluding that there is no future in the party that once dominated the so-called Solid South. That the...

I'd like to hear from any Freepers down in Dixie on a societal question. I'd like to know if the old southern virtues survive, or if mass-media culture has erased or eroded them. I'm talking about the basic manners, and in particular, the relationship of young people to adults. Allow me a moment to explain. I was born and raised in New Jersey. I was in many respects NOT raised right. EXCEPT, I was fortunate enough to spend extended periods down in Alabama with my grandmother. I attended public school for a short time in Alabama as well. This was...

One tragedy of war is that its victors write its history and often do so with bias and dishonesty. That’s true about our War of 1861, erroneously called a civil war. Civil wars, by the way, are when two or more parties attempt to take over the central government. Jefferson Davis no more wanted to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington, in 1776, wanted to take over London. Both wars were wars of independence. Kevin Sieff, staff writer for The Washington Post, penned an article “Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiers,” (Oct. 20, 2010). The...

Political considerations color the divergent views of presidential candidates on whether the Confederate flag should be moved from the State House grounds. For Republicans competing in the Feb. 2, 2008, GOP primary, where white voters will hold sway, the flag is a state issue that the candidates are not eager to discuss. On the Democratic side, where half or more of the voters in the Jan. 29, 2008, primary will be black residents, candidates have no qualms about calling for the flag’s removal. “Each side is playing to its basic constituency,” said Blease Graham, a political science professor at USC....

The Republican Party is set to defeat Democrats in the upcoming state governments in the heart of the South and will completely dominate the election this time. It is expected that the Republicans will win in Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama and will win every state elected office. If the Republican manages to win these states, they would get the power to redraw the congressional districts after the 2010 census. It will allow the Republicans to raise more funds and launch aggressive campaign for the Republican candidates in the 2012 races. White conservative voters in the South are set...

A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War -- a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery's role as a cause of the conflict. The passage appears in "Our Virginia: Past and Present," which was distributed in the state's public elementary schools for the first time last month. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, said she found the information about black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work...

More than 200 people have signed a petition to protest a resident flying the Confederate battle flag...The moves follow a controversy, when a new resident hung a Confederate battle flag from her porch alongside an American flag...

The American flag, which Robert E. Lee had defended as a soldier, flew at half mast in Lexington, Virginia.

n my youth there was a popular song entitled: “Save Your Confederate Money, Boys… the South Is Gonna Rise Again!” I began thinking about it as I watched a group of talking heads discussing the future of America, as a single entity comprised of 50 states. The consensus was -- America will not survive as a 50-state nation. It is a conclusion, which I, unhappily, arrived at years ago. I am convinced we Americans are being lied to by our government. I am also convinced our economy is on the verge of collapse. Maybe it is just my natural paranoia,...