If for M.E. Bradford, Abraham Lincoln was a gnostic renegade and heretic beyond the pale, he was for Richard Weaver a political and rhetorical father figure with whom one might argue but never condemn. These Southerners’ differing critiques of Lincoln’s person, views, and actions cast some light on this complex figure, one who continues [...]
For some time I had puzzled over a discrepancy or inconsistency between two of Richard Weaver’s essays which treat of Lincoln to one degree or another. In his “Abraham Lincoln and the Argument from Definition” (1953), Weaver praises Lincoln as a “conservative” by virtue of his employment of the argument from definition on such [...]
It may be justly said that the past, if it is to live, must live in us; the corollary is that if it does not, then we perforce participate, to one degree or another, in a kind of living death. This is the heart of Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Then Lytle [...]