Posted in Civil War Women and Gender

The Love Letters of Thomas Jefferson Withers to James Henry Hammond Future Governor of South Carolina

The letters of Thomas Jefferson Withers to James Hammond are a source for finding out the attitudes of elite Southern men before the Civil War….

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Posted in Civil War

Dying in the Last Months of the Civil War a Confederate Former Senator Conceals His Grave from Sherman

On November 13, 1864 Senator Hammond died at the age of fifty six years old. Hammond was lionized in Secessionist circles in the South for…

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Posted in White Supremacy White Supremacy Apologetics Women and Gender

A Southern Belle Reflects on “the blessings American ‘slavery’ had brought to the…black men”

In her book A Belle of the Fifties the Confederate senator’s wife Virginia Clay wrote about slavery as though its principal purpose was to bring…

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Posted in Lost Cause Women and Gender

A Southern Belle Set a Child Molester Up as a Paragon of Christian Virtue for Black People

Virginia Clay-Cloptin was in her mid-30s when the Civil War began. The prominent wife of a United States senator who resigned from Congress when his…

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