A Short History of the South, Part 7

This flag was spotted on Lake Norman, NC in March 2026, as reported by Cedar Posts on X. (https://x.com/CedarPosts/status/2034835422535196824)

The Last Half Century to the Present


Rather than continuing my detailed history of the Southern people I wish to comment on our situation at the moment, 2026, and prospects for the future.


We have never been in greater danger of losing our identity as of the South. The population has changed. There are rust belt refugees. Some of these are good people who have joined us for the right reasons, others not. Vast numbers of Mexicans, Asians of various sorts, and others populate our cities. It was on our former territory, Charlotte, that a depraved criminal immigrant murdered a legitimate immigrant. Such a thing would have been beyond imagining or comprehension 60 years ago when I was covering the Charlotte police beat for the local daily.


Our symbols have been subjected to malicious destruction, although that ridiculous campaign, an attempt to obliterate American as well as Southern history, has brought forth a good deal of opposition. A statue of Ceasar Rodney, a heroic signer of the Declaration of Independence, was removed because he, like almost all of the Founders, Northern and Southern, was the master of imported and native-born Africans.


A lot has been said about the South’s increasing prosperity in recent times. That is good, but I am of the impression that the rewards go disproportionately to bankers, developers, carpetbaggers, politicians, and bureaucrats. Working and middle class men and women are still enlisting in the imperial armed forces, real jobs being scarce in our looted economy.


Yet the South has a soul, unlike materialist mainstream America. We have always been able to absorb newcomers. A fourth of Confederate generals were Northern or foreign born. Many aspects of our culture and our history remain honoured by and attractive to civilised and intelligent people beyond our borders.


There were Southerners before there were “Americans.” Or to put it another way, Southerners were the first Americans. What we have known as the South existed more than two centuries before the U.S. government—now a bloated criminal empire unrecognisable to our Founders.


Even after our just and noble war for independence failed, we kept our identity. We were never quite acceptable as “Americans” and that did not bother us at all.


There are still millions of us. Beleaguered as our homeland has been, we have the truest connection to American origins of any of the motley groups now to be found in the United States.


It has been almost a century since Twelve Southerners issued I’ll Take My Stand. They hoped to provide a humane alternative to the standard American materialism, whether capitalist or collectivist. Their ideas are still true. Without Southern literature, music, humour, chivalric instincts, and manners “American” culture would be an impoverished thing of money and ideology.


We need to preserve the South in these difficult times because it is ours. But also, a Southerner is a good thing to be, a valuable contribution to waning Western civilisation.


I have been encouraged for some years now by the bright young people who have been reconnecting with their Southern roots in a society where no other real identity is to be found.


We need to remember who we are and promote and preserve our identity as a people in every way possible. Our people are sound in their hearts and some leaders have provided good direction in recent times. But we need a lot more leadership. History is not fixed and the future is to some extent ours to bring about.

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James Warley Miles, South Carolina’s internationally recognised theologian, in 1863 said something we all should remember: “No people has ever wholly existed without a meaning.”