Rusty Cage Gray

Memorial Day “They live in memory: they live in history: they are with us in our Monuments, to refine our selfishness, to purify our ambitions, to chasten our hopes, and to exalt our courage.” 🫡

Our birthday is sometime in April of 1670, South Carolina was 118 years old in 1788.

Nikki Haley's son says "the South has made more PROGRESS in the last 160 years than any other region" He adds "thankfully, it's PROGRESSED ECONOMICALLY while still maintaining its culture and tradition." But his own mother took down the Confederate flag from South Carolina! 😡

Is the Lost Cause Mythology a creation of leftist historians? One might be forgiven for thinking so after examining the work of some of the most celebrated liberal academics of the mid-20th century, whose writings contained elements now casually dismissed as Confederate apologia. Take Henry Steele Commager, the quintessential liberal historian and vocal champion of civil liberties and the New Deal. In the long-standard textbook he co-authored with Samuel Eliot Morison, The Growth of the American Republic, Commager and Morison described slaves as generally well-treated, adequately fed, and often devoted to their owners—portraying plantation life in terms that would make modern activists howl with accusations of "Lost Cause" mythology. The same work, consistent with the era's scholarship, extolled Robert E. Lee's personal nobility and character, presenting the marble man of Virginia as a figure of tragic dignity rather than a traitor to the sacred cause of equality. Consider also Carl Degler, a pioneering feminist who became one of the two male founding members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a staunch progressive voice on race and gender. Yet this leftist icon argued that the Civil War was fundamentally fought over the Union's conception of nationalism—a conflict of competing nationalisms in the age of nation-building—rather than a simple morality play about slavery's immediate abolition. By framing the war in these broader terms of state centralization and national unity, Degler downplayed the singular moral horror of chattel slavery in favor of structural and ideological explanations that echo long-criticized "states' rights" undertones, all while maintaining impeccable leftist credentials. Then there's Richard Hofstadter, the influential liberal historian whose The American Political Tradition remains a staple of progressive education. Hofstadter offered a withering critique of Abraham Lincoln, depicting him not as the Great Emancipator but as a shrewd, ambitious politician more concerned with preserving the Union and the economic interests of white workers than with genuine racial equality. He famously described the Emancipation Proclamation as possessing "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading," stripping away the saintly mythos to reveal a pragmatic operator navigating political realities—interpretations that, if uttered by a Southern conservative today, would instantly brand the speaker a Lost Cause crank. The old ploy of calling the Dunning School racist and therefore invalid fails for the same reason: every historian of the North can be called a "Lost Causer" because the term has no consistent scholarly meaning. It is a blunt political weapon, deployed to stifle debate and smear any analysis that complicates the desire to tear down statues and rewrite the past into a simple tale of villains and heroes. -Staff of Jefferson Davis

Thomas J. Jackson Christian, Jr. was almost 6 when he participated at the unveiling of his great-grandfather’s memorial in Charlottesville, October 1921. The Lynchburg (VA) News October 20, 1921 ⬇️

When Republicans make jokes about Democrats from the past they're really making jokes at the expense of the South. If you're a Southerner, they're laughing at your history and expecting you to laugh along with them. I get that it's good to laugh at yourself, but this is mockery.

Thomas Jefferson loved macaroni and cheese and ice cream as favorite meals. He brought both back from France and popularized them in America when they were rare luxuries. Now, what was once an exotic presidential treat is in every grocery store.