"Defending Dixie's Land" by Isaac Bishop

I grew up with relatives who were still fighting the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, as my grandmother described it). I knew about the Lost Cause, usually referred to simply as “The Cause.” I had watched Gone with the Windcountless times with my mother, and I knew it not as a movie based on a novel but as history. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school that my American history teaching challenged our class to explore received history and find out what really happened in the Civil War. 

It was an eye-opening exercise. And yet I knew that while my relatives and my received wisdom were largely and mostly wrong, my understanding wasn’t entirely wrong. For example, the abolition movement in America was empowered by a powerful propaganda war, which often exaggerated reality to score points in public opinion (as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, himself a part of that propaganda war, would come to realize and regret). Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin without having set foot on a slave-owning plantation, yet Northern readers accepted it as fact. And the idea of secession by individual states were first advanced and popularized, not by the southern states, but by the New England states, which wanted high tariffs to protect their own manufacturing interests and were willing to entertain leaving the Union to achieve their goals. 

 

Still, it was something of a surprise to read Defending Dixie's Land: What Every American Should Know About the South and the Civil War (2023) by Isaac Bishop, a pen name for writer Jeb Smith. He’s born and raised in Vermont, no less (a Yankee!). 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Captain James Waddell of CSS Shenandoah: “Having Done My Duty” – Dwight Hughes at Emerging Civil War.

 

The Haunting Truth of Dostoyevsky’s Demons – Benjamin Carlson at The Free Press.

 

The Faith of E.E. Cummings – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

“The Night-Ride,” poem by Kenneth Slessor – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Royal Banners Forward Go – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.