Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

Small stories that don’t warrant larger posts all their own.

• The City of Lexington, Virginia will make its case at a hearing in Roanoke on June 11, seeking to have the lawsuit filed against them by the Virginia SCV thrown out. I doubt they will be successful in getting the case dismissed, but it will be the first time (I think) that each side will lay out their positions in court. My earlier thoughts on the plaintiff’s likelihood of prevailing in court are here.
• The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery is opening two new exhibits of Civil War images, including “The Confederate Sketches of Adalbert Volck,” the caricaturist who liked to vilify Lincoln and other Northern figures. Who says Confederate voices are censored in “the Empire”?
• The Confederate submersible H. L. Hunley was known as the “peripatetic coffin” for sinking three times, killing its crew each time. Turns out, it’s not so great on the freeway, either.
• This month marks the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, a major strategic development which effectively closed the mouth of the Mississippi to the Confederacy. Wartime operations in this part of the South sometimes don’t feel like they get the attention that they should. The Plaquemines Parish Historical Association in Louisiana is looking to change that.
• In that same area, several Confederate monuments in New Orleans were defaced with graffiti in protest of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. That does nothing to serve the cause of justice, asshats.
• The Harper House on the Bentonville Battlefield State Historic Site in North Carolina served during the conflict as a hospital. Now experts will test to see whether stains in the floorboards are actually from blood, as long believed.
• The Virginia Flaggers continue to generate free publicity for the Museum of the Confederacy’s new Appomattox facility. Lots of familiar faces at the protest Saturday, including Karen Cooper, who was twice the Confederate her colleagues were. I see Billy Bearden was there, too, pushing the Grant-was-a-slaveholder meme. Dramatic but way-inside-baseball slogans seemed to be the theme of the day, and you gotta ask how many regular visitors to the new museum actually understood what the protest was about. I also wonder where Edgerton was; maybe no one was fronting his $20K speaking fee.
• Speaking of the Flaggers, former-state-SCV-officer-turned-culture-wars-columnist Mark Vogl argues that Susan Hathaway, of Virginia Flaggers fame, may be a Southern Sarah Palin. I agree, though probably for different reasons.
• One Southron recently posted the cover of a raunchy 1960 pulp novel, She Wouldn’t Surrender: The Wild Days and Nights of Belle Boyd – the Notorious Confederate Spy (right), as a “dedication to all Southern Belle’s [sic.].” I’m sure they, and any descendants of Belle Boyd living today, are mighty pleased to be depicted with that particular imagery. Other works in the same vein by James Kendricks (pen name of well-known comic writer Gardner F. Fox) include Sword of Casanova, The Adulterers, Beyond Our Pleasure and Love Me Tonight.
• Finally, congratulations to Clint Lacy, who recently changed the tagline of his blog to “we cover the news like the dew covers Dixie.” At least now, when he’s going off on a rant about how Columbian drivers are ruining NASCAR, or race-baiting the presidential campaign, or comparing Rick Santorum to Adolph Hitler, or using a dead teenager as an excuse to whine about all the streets in the South named after MLK, he’s not simultaneously claiming to be “your voice in the Sons of Confederate Veterans.” Whatever else its faults might be, the SCV doesn’t deserve to be linked with that.

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