What Can We Learn From the Confederacy? by Brion McClanahan

“5. Most American historians are as stupid as Google AI.”

“This is just the tip of the iceberg, but you get the point. Google AI suggests that nearly everything about the Confederacy was negative while also offering two points on the post-bellum South, both of which are also false.”

What Can We Learn From the Confederacy?

by Brion McClanahan

[Publisher’s Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. – This excellent article appeared on the Abbeville Institute Blog April 2, 2026 by Brion McClanahan, president of the Abbeville Institute.

There are many excellent things about AI but Southern history is not one of them. AI is trained on public sources especially newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal so it regurgitates what they write.

The Wall Street Journal is OK (they did publish a half page op/ed by former Secretary of the Navy, Jim Webb, strongly supporting the Confederate Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery) but think about what the ultra-woke NY Times did with the 1619 Project, which proclaims that the American Revolution was fought because the Brits were about to abolish slavery. That is ignorance of a scale that is almost unfathomable.

When leftist politics with its hate and race obsession replaced objective truth as the standard for history in most of academia and the media starting in the 1960s, you could hear the fabric of our nation rip, and it is ongoing. The right still believes in American goodness and exceptionalism, as do some in the middle, but much of the left, perhaps most, hates our country with a passion.

Look at the recent indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which allegedly made hundreds of millions of dollars promoting hate across our country for the benefit of the Marxist left.

It is my great hope that if the SPLC indictment is true, and we all know it is, then all the people they have damaged can SUE THEM to Hell and back for causing the destruction of magnificent, ancient Confederate memorials to war dead and American valor across the country. Think of what we have lost because of the removal of hundreds of such beautiful expressions of humanity, history, love and patriotism.

Confederate monuments were created with tears and blood, paid for with pennies from school children and other fundraising that often took years. Some 750,000 died in the War Between the States and over a million were maimed.

Historian James McPherson wrote in his book, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam:

[T]he overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II.ⁱ

No honorable person can believe that a single one of those monuments was built for any reason other than mourning the dead who enthusiastically died fighting a barbaric invader with four times their population and hundreds of times more weaponry. The North’s goal was to prevent the establishment of a Southern republic on its southern border committed to free trade and with 100% control of the world’s most demanded commodity, King Cotton.

The South was industrializing and did not need the high-priced North, but the North had to have the South to sell its overpriced goods to, and for Southern commodities. The North was dead without the South, at that point in history, and that’s why Lincoln started his war.

The Marxist playbook tells them: to destroy a country, destroy its history first. It’s happening today in Minnesota, New York and other blue states but it will never happen in the South.

The South and the Confederacy are the heirs of the Founding Fathers. America was founded in the South on May 14, 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia and the Revolutionary War was won in the South. South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860, and where our great war for independence started in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, her license tag states: “Where the Revolutionary War Was Won.”

Our Confederate ancestors were the children and grandchildren of those Revolutionary War patriots, and 44% of the modern United States Military has traditionally been recruited in the South.

It is up to us to make sure the truth prevails, and it will. The racist, violent, corrupt woke left is crumbling before our very eyes (Goodbye Barack Obama, the most race obsessed president in American history) and GOOD RIDDANCE.]

What Can We Learn From the Confederacy?

by Brion McClanahan

First published on the Abbeville Institute Blog April 2, 2026.

April is Confederate History or Heritage Month in six States. Virginia used to recognize the month as well, but no longer.

Many Americans tend to believe that “Southern history” is nothing more than “Confederate history.” That would relegate the history of the region to a failed four year attempt at independence. Drew Gilpiln Faust, former President of Harvard University and current Board Member of Goldman Sachs, argued in her The Creation of Confederate Nationalism that slavery offered the only unifying factor in Southern history. In other words, Southern identity was strictly intertwined with the institution-“Southern” culture would not exist without it-and that South was just like the other sections in America except for the “peculiar institution.”

That makes Confederate history little more than a study of slavery and treason.

I asked Google Gemini to identify what Americans can learn from the Confederacy, not directly, but because I was attempting to find any article on the topic. Here is what it provided:

The Confederacy teaches the dangers of prioritizing systemic oppression-specifically slavery-over human rights, highlighting how ideologies based on white supremacy and the “Lost Cause” narrative can endure. It serves as a study in failed rebellion, the high cost of disunion, and the lasting necessity of challenging sanitized history.

Key lessons from the Confederacy include:

The Centrality of Slavery: The Confederacy was explicitly established to protect, preserve, and expand the institution of chattel slavery.

The Danger of Narratives: For decades, “Lost Cause” textbooks intentionally rewritten history, glorifying the South to shape educational standards and creating false, enduring narratives about the war’s purpose.

The Role of Symbols in Power: Confederate statues, often erected from the 1890s-1920s, were intentionally used to enforce white supremacy and intimidate Black citizens.

The Danger of Internal Disunion: The conflict illustrates the severe consequences of extreme regional polarization and states holding more loyalty to local identity than to the federal union.

Military and Strategic Failures: The Confederacy demonstrates the danger of hubris, such as prioritizing tactical, offensive action over a necessary war of attrition and ignoring strategic advice.

The Consequences of Dehumanization: Society can learn the necessity of acknowledging the atrocities of slavery and resisting the temptation to sanitize or sentimentalize a cause built on forced labor.

Different Perspectives on Duty: The conflict shows that individuals can be motivated by the defense of their homes even when fighting for a fundamentally unjust cause.

And we wonder why young Americans are so lost. Remember, AI pulls from whatever online sources it can find and then regurgitates what it clips from the Internet.

But if you listen to people like Faust or Heather Cox Richardson or Karen Cox-I’m noticing a trend-the South actually won the War. That would be news to them and of course news to anyone who has paid attention. They create a straw man, in this case the “Lost Cause” bogeyman, and then claim that it must be defeated to save history.

I don’t know what courses they took, but the Google AI response is the dominant narrative in American schools today, both in K-12 as well as higher education. And it has been so for decades. Any narrative that offers an alternative view is cast aside as “Lost Cause” revisionism or “whitewashing.” Google used sanitized, but the meaning is the same.

But what can we really learn from the Confederacy?

I’ll offer five suggestions.

1. Self-determination is the central topic in the American experience, North and South.

2. Decentralization of power was designed to prevent tyranny and the imperial presidency. The Confederate Constitution included checks to that effect. Abraham Lincoln proved their point.

3. Men defending their home and hearth from a foreign invader while vastly outnumbered and outgunned are heroic and should be celebrated by all Americans.

4. American Constitutionalism reached its zenith during the debates over the Confederate Constitution in 1861.

5. Most American historians are as stupid as Google AI.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but you get the point. Google AI suggests that nearly everything about the Confederacy was negative while also offering two points on the post-bellum South, both of which are also false.

We would do well to critically examine the Confederate experience. Those men have much to teach American society on constitutionalism, power dynamics, and decentralization. We would also do well to consider the Confederate solider as an important part of American military history. They were respected by their foes for decades after the War. If Union men, those who were literally shot by Confederate soldiers, could recognize their heroism, we should, too. Anything less is “dehumanization.”

Brion McClanahan

Brion McClanahan is the President of the Abbeville Institute