Drawing from American musical sources and texts, Michael Dougherty's composition for chorus and orchestra echoes the resonance and dissonance of Mount Rushmore as a complex icon of American history. Like Mount Rushmore, the libretto is carved out of the words of each President. Mount Rushmore (2010) for chorus and orchestra is inspired by the monumental [...]
On that summer-hot afternoon at Gettysburg, after two days of fighting in the summer-lush Pennsylvania countryside, the fate of two nations still hung in the balance. General Robert E. Lee intended to tip the scales. Just before 3 o’clock on the morning of July 3, 1863, Robert E. Lee rose by starlight, ate a spartan [...]
Stand Watie (Cherokee: ᏕᎦᏔᎦ, romanized: Degataga, lit. 'Stand firm') (December 12, 1806 – September 9, 1871), also known as Standhope Uwatie, Tawkertawker, and Isaac S. Watie, was a leader of the Cherokee Nation. They allied with the Confederacy, and he was the only Native American to attain a general's rank in the Civil War, Confederacy [...]
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee were among the decisive figures of American history. If all are dishonored, with their statues pulled down and their names taken off cities, counties, towns, rivers, canals, bridges, buildings, highways, roads, streets and dams, then what is left? "Can we all just get along?" That was the [...]
As Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. rightly points out in his new book, there is no denying that there were other questions besides the issue of slavery energizing the air prior to the War Between the States, questions which cannot be entirely trivialized. It Wasn’t About Slavery: Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War, by [...]
It is portentous, and a thing of state That here at midnight, in our little town A mourning figure walks, and will not rest, Near the old court-house pacing up and down, Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards He lingers where his children used to play, Or through the market, on the well-worn stones [...]
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 issues [...]
This song was written in 1864 in honor of General Ulysses S. Grant, who was appointed commander of all the Union armies in March of that year. Words by Charles Haynes and music by J.E. Haynes. Published by Root and Cady of Chicago. —Editor Lyrics All hail to Ulysses, the patriot’s friend, The hero of [...]
Stephen Douglas’s faith that democratic self-government on the American frontier would create a spontaneous order of lawful and virtuous communities, especially in the face of divisive issues like slavery, was disastrously misplaced and played a significant role in starting the Civil War. The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed 165 years ago this past spring, and as cannons [...]
Abraham Lincoln's great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary [...]
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 asked: [...]
History is complex, messy, and unyielding to our dearest wishes for easy categorization. That Alexander Stephens understood the Confederacy through its cornerstone of slavery is plainly true and explained in his own words. But the “Cornerstone Speech” goes further, planting the other corners of the Confederate state in concerns over federalism and sovereignty. Anxious onlookers [...]
Under advanced liberalism there is an expectation that anybody who so much as dares to speak civilly to or about any figure associated with the Confederacy is to be deemed persona non grata. For Catholics as Catholics, such sweeping and absolutist expectations are simply unacceptable. Forth from its scabbard, high in the air Beneath Virginia’s [...]
Lord Acton believed that the wrong side won the American Civil War. Such a judgment could hardly be said to be a minor detail of someone’s historical worldview, yet this judgment has somehow been obscured. “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Among Catholic students of political thought, few figures are more liable to [...]