When the winners of the American Civil War, Liberal Yankees, discarded the facts and completely rewrote its narrative in order to conceal the constitutionality of secession, one of the most crucial features of the Confederacy was lost to history: the record of the national spirit of the Southern people shortly before, during, and after the conflict. This sentiment, which described the emotional impetus behind Dixie's war efforts, was vigorously chronicled by Southern poets, who penned a massive corpus of poignant Confederate verse that, tragically, seemed to vanish after the turn of the Twentieth Century. We have been much poorer for its disappearance.
In his one-of-a-kind 600 page work Victorian Confederate Poetry: The Southern Cause in Verse, 1861-1901, award-winning Southern historian and internationally acclaimed Civil War scholar Colonel Lochlainn Seabrook brings these suppressed and forgotten Southern compositions back to life. The nearly 400 poems he has carefully selected embody a wide spectrum of writing, thought, and emotion, covering the universal themes of war, patriotism, courage, honor, duty, heritage, family, faith, loss, and death.
Among his poets are numerous Confederate soldiers and officers, hundreds of Southern civilians, several South-loving foreigners, and even a handful of respectful Yankees. Both men and women, children and seniors, are represented. For aficionados of Victorian, Southern, and Confederate verse, Colonel Seabrook has included the South's most important and favorite poets, among them: William Gilmore Simms, Sidney Lanier, Catherine Anne Warfield, Thomas Nelson Page, Olive Tully Thomas, James Ryder Randall, John Reuben Thompson, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Henry Timrod, Jane T. H. Cross, Abram Joseph Ryan, Annie Chambers Ketchum, Francis Orray Ticknor, John Esten Cooke, and, of course, "the poet laureate of the South," Paul Hamilton Hayne.
The moving heartfelt words of these celebrated bards, as well as many other lesser known poets, expose and utterly demolish the countless Yankee myths, Liberal lies, and Northern fictions that were invented to shame the South, silence critics, and bury the facts surrounding the world's most misunderstood war. Read this book and discover the Truth for yourself. Find out why the South seceded, why she fought, why she was ready to sacrifice everything for the principle of constitutional conservatism - in the actual words of those who lived through it. Heavily illustrated with authe