Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama by Stephen Fox. Hardcover: 336 pages. (New York, NY: Knopf, 2007.) Amazon Price: $17.13.

Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama is a fluid and captivating tale of the Confederate Raider helmed by the Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes. This book, in particular, focuses on his almost two-year stint as captain of the infamous Confederate privateer, the Alabama.

The Anti-Federalists

"The anti-federalists," notes Ralph Ketcham in the introduction to a popular edition of their writings:

[Looked] to the Classical idealization of the small, pastoral republic where virtuous, self-reliant citizens managed their own affairs and shunned the power and glory of empire. To them, the victory in the American Revolution meant not so much the big chance to become a wealthy world power, but rather the opportunity to achieve a geniunely republican polity, far from the greed, lust for power, and tyranny that had generally characterized human society. ¹

In many ways, the group has been misnamed. After all, federalism refers to the system of decentralized government. As Mel Bradford notes, in the Virginia Convention, Patrick Henry, the leader of the Anti-Federalists "conjured up an image of the Constitution as it might become [and] much of his prophecy has been confirmed." ²

From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition by Clyde Wilson. Hardcover: 304 pages. (Columbia, SC: Foundation for American Education, 2003), Amazon.com $24.95.

Review by Ryan Setliff

From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition is an anthology of essays and writings by historian Clyde Wilson. As Joseph Stromberg writes in the introduction, "Dr. Clyde Wilson is a Christian, a Southerner, an American, an historian and a conservative. For over three decades he has worked on the definitive edition of the Papers of John C. Calhoun, has written on Calhoun and published a collection of Calhoun's most important writings." Wilson is a luminary figure amongst southern conservatives in my humble opinion, and yet modest about his own accomplishments. He has also written a splendid biographical history of General James Johnston Pettigrew and assembled an anthology of essays in tribute to the late Mel Bradford. As Stromberg opines, "His writings—published in Modern Age, Chronicles, Telos, and many other forums—shows Professor Wilson off as the kind of conservative who is a stalwart defender of federalism and republicanism, and the liberties associated with them. Such conservatives are few and far between these days."

The Real Henry Clay: The Corrupt American Architect of Mercantilism and Protectionism

Today in history marks the two hundred and twenty-ninth anniversary of Henry Clay’s birthday. Clay was born in Hanover County, Virginia on April 12, 1777. Clay was a founder and key leader of the Whigs and the National Republican Party in the United States, though he got his start in politics as a Democrat. Clay was admitted to the bar in 1797 and commenced practice in Lexington, Kentucky. He rose to become a prominent U.S. Senator for Kentucky by the 1830s, and he gained considerable prestige in the eyes of many historians for his role in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a Congressman. According to Carl Schurz, a German émigré, professed national revolutionist, and a Union general, Clay was said to be a political success because:

The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas Woods, Jr. Hardcover: 270 pages. (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2004), $13.57.

Review by Ryan Setliff

The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is a handy compendium which deftly challenges the politically correct orthodoxy that has become entrenched in the academia and media establishment. This politically incorrect guide to American history is not just some eccentric rewrite, but a bold challenge to years of prevalent liberal mythology and revisionism that has become holy writ amongst academia, the media and the publishing establishment. With the help of the Marxist Frankfurt School, there has been no shortage of trashing of America's heroes and a real fog has been cast over our past as it really was. Also, there is a pervasive tendency to accentuate the negative and ignore the positive in American history. Not surprisingly, the founding fathers are dismissed as repressive white men whose defining attribute revolves around being slaveholders. Many American history books celebrate the aggrandizement of power within the State and others like Howard Zinn echo Marxist themes of class warfare where the American people find a savior in FDR with his sweeping New Deal social and labour reforms. In the eyes of many historians, centralizers and leaders that champion big government have become America's heroes.

Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom by Ludwig von Mises. Hardcover: 826 pages. (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2001), $35.00.

Review by Ryan Setliff

Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom is an intriguing historical assessment of the American Presidency, which has become one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Likewise, the American Presidency has dramatically changed since its inception. Most modern history books on the Presidency are characterized by adulation of executive power, administrative largess, and aggressive federal intervention in domestic, economic and foreign policy. Nonetheless, this powerful reassessment of the Presidency by the Mises Institute challenges such hagiographic tomes that idolize the President and venerate the dictatorial Presidents for their constitutional usurpations and assumptions of un-delegated power solidified as precedent.

This powerful tome is essentially an anthology of essays offering a critical analysis of the Presidency as an institution, and the various Presidents through the year, as well as an assessment of their policy prerogatives, etc. Most of the authors do not mince words and they hold to a priori presupposition that constitutionally limited government is desirable and offer no apologies in their condemnation of those who usurp it. Some contributors are cynical enough to bluntly declare the utter impossibility of limited government like Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

North Against South: The American Iliad 1848-1877 by Ludwell H. Johnson. Paperback: 301 pages. (Columbia, SC: Foundation for American Education, 2003), Amazon.com $9.95.

Review by Ryan Setliff

North Against South: The American Iliad 1848-1877 by Ludwell Johnson is a most provocative account of the road to disunion, the late War Between the States, and the short-lived Confederacy which was militarily extirpated in 1865.

Ludwell Johnson presents basic objective historical facts from the beginning of the sectional crisis that afflicted antebellum America. The problem today is that what passes for objectivity these days is scholarship that squarely casts the blame for the conflict on southern intemperance while marginalizing northern usurpations of the compact and its conduct in the war. While it is admitted that a pro-Unionist could feasibly write an objective account, many historians spend their time obfuscating historical fact, rationalizing atrocities and downplaying abuses committed by the Lincoln regime.

The Real Lincoln : A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas DiLorenzo. Hardcover: 384 pages. (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2002), $10.85.

Review by Ryan Setliff

The Real Lincoln : A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War is destined to be a classic! DiLorenzo offers an insightful expose on the Real Lincoln, his unconstitutional regime and unnecessary war. Columnist Joseph Sobran calls it, "a devastating critique of America's most famous President." Many Americans nostalgically venerate Abraham Lincoln as the greatest President throughout American history. His standing as the Great Emancipator and a champion of black equality has become part of a celebrated, albeit erroneous American mythology. This book carries the endorsement of acclaimed black conservative Walter Williams who also repudiates the myth the slavery abolition was the moral cause and catalyst for Lincoln's war. The lionized Abe Lincoln of today has an almost cult following, but he was not very popular in his time except among government bureaucrats, politically-connected special interests and industrialists. Some leaders in Mid-Atlantic States even contemplated secession and the formation of a central confederacy. Marshall DiLorenzo masterfully dethrones the entrenched myths perpetuated for years by biased historians and revisionist ideologues which give such moral imperative to the cause that Lincoln championed.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, and the first Republican President, is generally held in low esteem by paleoconservatives. Jurist Marshall DeRosa notes,

Lincoln's expansive interpretation of presidential powers made him the most imperial president in American history, thereby setting a dangerous precedent for predisposed successors. The incarceration of approximately twenty-thousand political prisoners, the closing of three hundred newspapers, the interruptions of state legislatures, the blockade of the South, the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus, explicit and implicit defense of the Supreme Court, the sanctioning of the creation of West Virginia, private property seizures, and electioneering/voting irregularities have all been rationalized as necessary war measures. ¹

Lincoln has been dubbed the American Caesar, and many conservative observers see his war to supress the secession of the southern states as America's journey across the Rubicon. Lincoln ushered in an unprecedented level of corruption, centralization, and usurpation of lawful authority, in flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution. By his precedents, Lincoln arguably effectuated the wholesale evisceration of the compact nature of the Union and the abdication of the constitutional polity of the American founding fathers under the pretense of saving the Union. The twentieth-century New Deal had its roots in the postbellum Reconstruction of the 1860s. As economists Mark Thornton and Robert Ekelund, Jr. observe:

The flurry of new laws, regulations, and bureaucracies created by President Lincoln and the Republican Party is reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, for the volume, scope, and questionable constitutionality of its legislative output. . . . [I]t should not be too surprising to learn that the term "New Deal" was actually coined in March 1865 by a newspaper editor in Raleigh to characterize Lincoln and the Republicans and persuade North Carolina voters to rejoin the Union. The massive expansion of the federal government into the economy led [historian] Daniel Elazar to claim that "one could easily call Lincoln’s presidency the New Deal of the 1860s."²

Frank Meyer explained,

Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution, for the coercive welfare state to come into being and bring about the conditions against which we are fighting today. Lincoln, I would maintain, undermined the constitutional safeguards of freedom as he opened the way to centralized government with all its attendant political evils. ³