In November, 1863, the New York Herald reported that a temperance committee had asked President Lincoln to dismiss Ulysses S. Grant. They told him the general was an imbiber of strong spirits, to which Lincoln replied: “I wish you would tell…
It’s October. Night comes earlier, the mornings are darker, fog has settled over the land, and liberals — when not busy denouncing the rule of law, rejecting the facts of life, or rioting in pussy hats — sit by their…
In the summer of 1862, just weeks before the Battle of Sharpsburg (or Antietam) — the bloodiest single day of fighting in American history — Union Captain George Armstrong Custer attended the wedding of Confederate Captain John “Gimlet” Lea at…
White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly was attacked last week for his comments that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man and that the Civil War might have been avoided by compromise. But no one attacked the comments…
George Washington will be booted from the church he helped to found in Alexandria, Virginia. To understand what’s happening, we have to go back more than 100 years. In 1870, the clergy and communicants of Christ Church, an Episcopal congregation…
T.S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruellest month…mixing Memory and desire…” But he never spent a sun-drenched, late summer’s day on Antietam Creek where poignant beauty mixes with memory and blood. The battle of Antietam, or Sharpsburg (southerners use…
If Confederate statues are really generators of racial hate, as their most fervent detractors insist, it seems incongruous that over the past 50 years attitudes in the South on race have seen such an incredible transformation, all the while under…
Governor Andrew Cuomo has written a letter to the Acting Secretary of the Army asking that the names of two streets in Fort Hamilton Army Base in Brooklyn be removed. The two streets are named in honor of Confederate General…
In these very — I mean very — weird times of ours, few phenomena appear weirder than what I would describe as the mania for pulling down or otherwise removing memorials to dead Confederates. New Orleans has done it. My…