Death of the Southern God

by Mark Douglas Suddenly, they never mentioned the God of slavery again. The Great Hush. SHHHHH — We don’t talk about that God anymore. Can you kill a God? No.  But you can show it’s so fake that its own believers never mention Him again.  That’s what happened to the Southern “God of Slavery.” What the South bragged about at Continue Reading →

Meet General Grant

by H.L. Mencken A review of Meet General Grant by W. E. Woodward (Horace Liverwright, publishers); The American Mercury, 1928 THE DREADFUL title of this book is not the least of its felicities. If they had been saying such things in his day it seems unquestionable that Grant would have said, “Meet the wife.” He was precisely that sort of Continue Reading →

The Calamity of Appomattox

by H.L. Mencken The American Mercury, September 1930 NO AMERICAN historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so Continue Reading →