Ever since Lincoln's War, the North has referred to Southerners as
"traitors" and "rebels," while claiming that the conflict itself was
fought "over slavery." After the War Confederate veterans were often
ridiculed, slandered, and disgraced, prohibited from wearing their
uniforms, displaying Confederate emblems, establishing Confederate
cemeteries, or erecting Confederate monuments. Southern women were even
prevented from decorating the graves of their husbands, sons, brothers,
and sweethearts. This anti-South sentiment has been vigorously carried
into the present day: the Confederate Flag is being banned, Confederate
graves are regularly defaced, Confederate monuments are being torn down
across the country, and once again the old charges of "treason" and
"racism" are being hurled at the South.
Is any of this credible? Of course not! And award-winning historian
Colonel Lochlainn Seabrook proves it in his unprecedented work Rise Up
and Call Them Blessed: Victorian Tributes to the Confederate Soldier,
1861-1901. Here, those who lived during the War, and more particularly
those who fought in it, are given voice to describe, explain, and
vindicate the actions of the South, from secession to so-called
"Reconstruction," in an open, truthful, and objective forum-without the
intrusion of editorializing pro-Union partisans. Thanks to Col. Seabrook
we are no longer dependent on the biased and willfully uninformed
opinions of South-loathing historians to learn the truth about the War.
We can finally view and understand the conflict as it was actually
experienced by the Conservative people of Dixie, rather than by those
using presentism, South-shaming, revisionism, and other Leftist tactics
to conceal the crimes and illegalities of the Liberal North.
Covering the mid to late Victorian period, Col. Seabrook, a leading
authority on Confederate culture, has carefully selected excerpts from
some 300 letters, speeches, reminiscences, personal observations,
anecdotes, stories, and official reports (military and civilian), that
fill in the many blank spaces left by Yankee historians. His entries are
made all the more enlightening and historically accurate by his
inclusion of the words of both men and women, European-Americans and
African-Americans, slaves and free blacks, Southerners and Northerners,
Confederate soldiers and Union soldiers, privates and generals, surgeons
and prisoners, upper class and lower class, educated and unschooled,
Conservatives and Liberals, sectionalists and nationalists; nearly the
entire spectrum of Victorian American society.
Generously illustrated and comprehensively researched, Rise Up and Call
Them Blessed reveals what Northern histories of the War have been
studiously avoiding for the past 150 years: The South was not treasonous
in leaving the Union; at that time secession was a legal act of true
conservatism and patriotism. The South did not take up arms over
slavery; she fought to preserve the original government of the Founding
Fathers. The South did not detest the black man; instead he was welcomed
into the Confederate armies with the promise of emancipation at war's
end. The Confederate soldier was not hated by Union officers; Federal
heroes such as Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, in fact, were in awe of
them.
These and a thousand other suppressed facts are fully revealed here in
the words of Southerners themselves, firsthand accounts offering
complete justification for the South's behavior before, during, and
after Lincoln's War. Available in paperback and hardcover.
Neo-Victorian scholar Lochlainn Seabrook, whose literary works range
from astronomy to zoology, is one of the most prolific and popular
writer-historians in the world today.
